[captioning made possible by democracy now!] amy: from pacifica, thisiss demomocracy now! >> noted that disastrous day for facebook, , being called the biggest one-day lossss in wall street hisistory. > facebook stock resumed trading today after the biggest one-day loss of any publicly traded company in history. >> see that fall? that was a shedding of $119 billion off the stock. amy: just days after facebook

lost a record $119 billion in a single day, facebook reveals it has uncovered a plot to use the network and instagram to covertly influence the midterm elections. the company responded by shutting down 32 pages and fake accounts with names like "black elevation," "mindful being," "resisters," "aztlan warriors." this comes months after facebook ceo mark zuckeberg apologized for being too slow to respond to russian interference ahead of the 2016 election. >> we did not takeke a broad enenough view of o our responsibility and that was a big mistake. and it was my mistake and i'm sorry. , started facebook, i run it and i'm responsible for what happens here. we will speak with professor siva vaidhyanathan, author of "antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy." all that and more, coming up. welcome to democracy now!,

democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. facebook says it has removed more than two dozen pages and accounts after uncovering a plot to covertly influence the upcoming midterm elections. the tech giant says the accounts were involved in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." among the accounts were "black elevation," "mindful being," "resisters," "aztlan warriors." combined, the accounts had a total of 290,000 followers and had created 30 events since april 2017, including a facebook event to organize a protest against the upcoming "unite the right" rally in washington, d.c. facebook said it did not have enough technical evidence to state who was behind the fake pages, but said the accounts engaged in some similar activity to pages tied to russia before the 2016 election. the revelations come as facebook continues to grapple with a number of controversies in the

united states and abroad. the senate intelelligence committee is holding a hearing today on sococial media and interference by foreign intelllligence agencies. after headlines, we'll spend the rest of the hour talking about facebook. a top health and human services official told lawmakers at a senate judiciary committee hearing tuesday that he had repeatedly warned the trump administration against separating immigrant families at the border. this is jonathan white. commander of the public health service commissioned corps, a branch of health and human services. >> during the deliberative process over the previous year, we raised a number of concerns in the program about any policy which would result in family separation. due to concerns we have about the best interest of the child, as to well as that would be operationally supportable. r stands for the office

of refugee resettlement. during the hearing, connecticut democratic senator richard blumenthal also questioned jonathan white about the psychological impact of separating children from their parents. >> the separation of children from their parents can cause significant risk of harm for children. >> it is dramatic for any child separated from his or her parents. is that correct? >> there is no question, there is no question that separation of children from pararents could traumaticdramatic -- injury to the child. amy: despite jonathan white's testimony, a top official with ice, that's the immigration and customs enforcement agency, tried to defend the trump administration's practice of separating children from their parents by comparing the child detention facilities to "summer camp." this is matthew albence, head of enforcement and removal operations for ice. >> i think the best way to describe them is more like a summer camp. these individuals have access to

20 47 food and water -- 24/7 food and water. a have educational opportunities, recreational opportunities, both structured and unstructured. there are basketball courts, exercise classes, soccer fields we put in. amy: about 700 children forcibly separated from their parents at the border have still not been reunited with their parents. in boston, hundreds of protesters rallied outside northeastern university to demand the university drop its $2.7 million research grant with ice. the protesters then marched to downtown boston and blocked beacon street in front of the home of northeastern's prpresident, demanding the university cut all ties with ice. organizers say 12 people were arrested during the protest. in more immigration news, minnesota residents are condemning the immigration and customs enforcement agency after plainclothes ice officers arrested a longtime minnesota resident named carlos urrutia at a federal courthouse last thursday.

in the video, the plainclothes officers are seen ripping carlos away from his family and arresting him, while his friends and family members demand to see identification and an arrest warrant. one of his friends said his arrest was "like a kidnapping." president trump lashed out at immigrants and called for strict voter id laws during a rally in tampa, florida, tuesday night. president trump: we believe that only american citizens should vote in american elections. [cheering] which is why the time has come for voter id, like everything else. voter id. [cheering] you know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need

a picture on a card, you need id , you go out and you want to buy anything, you need id, you need your picture. amy: it is not true that one needs a picture id to buy groceries. trump supporters also berated members of the media during tuesday night's rally. sucks."g chanting, "cnn following the event, president trump retweeted his son eric's tweet of a video showing trump supporters making that chant during the rally. in afghanistan, at least 15 people were killed in an attack on a government building in the eastern city of jalalabad tuesday. among the victims were international aid workers, including a member of the international rescue committee and a staffer for the united nation's international organization for migration. authorities have blamed the attack on isis. a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking a texas-based gun rights group from m sting onlile blueprints to make semiautomatic

assault weapons from 3-d printers. the injunction comes after the attorneys general of eight states and thehe district of colombiaia sued the trump administration, aimed to block ththe downloadable bluepeprintsm going online. this is massachusetts senator ed markey, one of the states that sued the administration. >> these downloaoadable firearms are available even to those who could not pass a background check. it is the ultimate gun loophole. why buy them if you can print them at home instead? these firearms are also untraceable. they will not have a serial number for law enforcement to reference. amy: in yemen, international aid agencies are warning of the risk of another cholera outbreak, after u.s.-backed, saudi-led airstrikes destroyed water and sanitation facilities in the besieged port city of hudaydah.

the u.n's world food programme country director, stephen anderson, also says more than 8 million yemenis are now experiencicing extreme hunger aa result of f the ongoing coconfl. >> more than anything else, the yemeni people now desperately need peace. stability, we can start to get people back on their feet, start to rebuild their livelihood. amy: in spain, taxi drivers are continuing an indefinite strike to protest wall street-backed ride hailing apps like uber, which they say have pushed longtime taxi cab drivers to financial ruin. on tuesday, hundreds of drivers erected tents along one of madrid's main thoroughfares to block traffic. taxi drivers have also launched encampmentnts to block traffic n main thoroughfares in barcelona. and a flotilla bound for gaza carrying medicine and other humanitarian aid was intercepted and seizeded sunday by the israi navy.

the al adwa boat to gaza was one of a three-ship "freedom flotilla" that set sail from palermo, sicily, on july 21 in efforts to break the ongoing israeli blockade of gaza. organizers say that the israeli military seized the boat sunday, assaulting and tasering multiple people, before detaining the 22 people on board, including international human rights activists from 16 countries. two israeli citizens and two journalists have been released, but the rest of the activists remain detained. "the middle east monitor" reports that norway is asking israel to explain the legal grounds for seizing the ship, which was flying a norwegian flag at the time of its capture. and those are some of the headlines. this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. juan: and i'm juan gonzalez. welcome to our viewers. "black elevation." "mindful being." "resisters." "aztlan warriors."

those are the names of some of the accounts removed from facebook and instagram tuesday, after facebook uncovered a plot to covertly influence the midterm elections. the tech giant said it uncovered 32 pages and fake accounts that were involved in what it described as "coordinated inauthentic behavior." the accounts had a total of 290,000 followers. the accounts also created 30 events since april 2017. one of the accounts had created a facebook event to promote a protest against the upcoming "unite the right" rally in washington, d.c. protest organizers say the fake account is not behind the event. facebook said it did not have enough technical evidence to state who was behind the fake pages, but said the accounts engaged in some similar activity to pages tied to russia before the 2016 election. facebook's announcement comes just days after the company suffered the biggest loss in stock market history, losing

about $119 billion in a single day. amy: facebook has been at the centnter of a number of controversies in the united states and abroad. earlier this year, facebook removed more than 270 accounts it determined to be controlled by the russia-controlled internet research agency. facebook made that move in early april justst days before founder and ceo mark zuckeberg was question on capitol hill about how the voter-profiling company cambridge analytica harvested data from more than 87 million facebook users without their permission, in efforts to sway voters to support president donald trump. zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for his company's actions. >> we did not take a broad enough few of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. it was my mistake. and i'm sorry. i started facebook, i run it,

and i'm responsible for what happens here. amy: today we spend the hour with leading critic of facebook, siva vaidhyanathan, author of "antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy." he is a professor of media studies and director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia. we are speaking to him in charlottesville. professor, welcome to democracy now! prof. vaidhyanathan: thanks. amy: let's begin with this latest news. there e are hearings the senate intelligence committee is holding and, yesterday, facebook removed a bunch of pages, saying they don't know if they are russian trolls, but they think they are inauthentic. and about what this means what research is being done and your concerns. prof. vaidhyanathan: facebook

was unconcerned for nearly a ,ecade that various groups either state-sponsored or sponsored by some troublemaking group, were popping up arounund facebook, not just in the united states, not just in reference to one election or wherever. in a concerted effort to civiline democracy in society. this has been going on since facebook has allowed pages to pop up, inteterest group phrhras to p pop up. cebook gotot caught ofoff guard, bizarrely, afteter the 2016 elelection. even though therere were people within facebook that were raising the alarm, that there were these pages, these accounts that were distributing nonsense, that were posing as black lives otherspages, there were that were posing as texas pages.

there were some supporting radical right and radical left positions. all of this came out after the 2016 election. before.d have come out facebook has been scrambling ever since. the 2016ave seen since election in the united states is every time there is a major election around the world, facebook will put all hands on that election. they make sure they can claim they are cleaning up its act. we saw that with elections in germany,y, the netherlands, andd france. we saw that with a referendum on abortion that was held in ireland earlier this year. in all of thesese cases, facebok has made sure to crow about all that it has done to clean up the

pollution that might distract people or disrupt the political prococess, the democratic proce. but it has not done much in other places in the country. it did almost nothing in mexico before its election. it has c come up with no stratey for dealing with the much larger mess in india, the world's largest democracy. facebook was instrumental in the election of brett regurgitates a duterte in the philippines. in all of these cases, forces interfered in the democratic rosses, distributed propaganda, misinformation, often funneled campaign support outside of , and it isnels largely because facebook is so easy to hijack. what was he just this week as facebook makes these announcements is that they have managed to identify a handful of sites that a few hundred

thousand people have interacted with. 5%,on't know if this is 10%, or 100% of the disruptive element going on before our off year elections coming up in november. juan: professor, one of the points you make in your book is that so much attention has been focused on the work of cambridge analytic, but that you believe that there is a much deeper, structural problem with facebook than just one company being able to access personal data and use it for nefarious political ends. could you talk about the structural issues you see? and you mentioned the philippines. most people have not heard much was helped torte win his election by facebook. could you give an example about how structurally it might have worked in the philippines? prof. vaidhyanathan: cambridge

analytica was a great story. it brought to public attention that facebook had encouraged applicatation developers to get maximal access to facebook data, not just from the people who volunteered to be watched. , but all of their friends. thousands of application developers got almost full access to millions of facebook users for five years. this was basic facebook policy. this line was lost in the storm over cambridge analytica. bybridge analytica was run bond villains. they look evil, they work for evil people. steve bannon helped run the company, it is paid for by robert mercer, one of the more evil hedgege fund managers in te united states.

cruz'srked for ted campaign and then for the breakfast campaign and for campaign,mp -- brexitt and for donald trump's campaign. the fact is that cambridge analytica is kind of a joke. it did not actually accomplish anything. push this weird psychometric model for voter behavior prediction, which no one believes works. the fact is the trump campaign, the ted cruz campaign, and the duterte campaign in the philippines, and the modi campaign in india used facebook itself to target voters, either to persuade them to vote or dissuade them from voting. this was the basic campaign. the facebook advertising platform allows you to target people quite precisely in groups as small as 20. you can base it on ethnicity, gender, interest, education level, zip code, or other

location markers. you can base it on people interested in certain hobbies, who read certain kind of books, who have certain professional backgrounds. you can slice and dice an audience so precisely. it is the reason facebook makes as much money as it does. if you are selling shoes, you would be a fool not to buy an ad on facebook. this is drawing all of the attention away from journalism and commercially based media, but political actors have figured out how to use this quite deftly. when modi ran, when rodrigo duterte, facebook at staff helping them use the system more effectively. facebook posted about the fact that modi and duterte were the facebook savvy candidates.

it is not an accident that they are dangerous nationalist leaders who have advocated violence against people or have sat back and folded their a arms as code roms happened against muslims -- pogroms happened against muslims. juan: i want to jerk -- turn to a meeting between mark zuckerberg and the indian president. >> you are one of the early adopters of the internet and social media and facebook. did you that point think that social media and the internet would become am important tool for governing and citizen engagement in foreign policy? media, i took to social even i did not know that i would become prime minister at some point. so i never did think that social

media would actually be useful for governance. took up social media, it was basically because i was curious about technology. i've been trying to undererstand the world through books, but ii think it is a a rt of humaman that it is easier. fact, if instead of a guide, someone can give you pretty sure suggestions of what to do, it is even better. juan: that was indian prime minister narendra modi talking with mark zuckerberg in 2015. professor, could you talk about has had.t that modi

43 million facebook followers? prof. vaidhyanathan: and that does not include whatsapp. that is also owned by facebook and is the most popular messaging service in inindia. it is tremendously important in violenceg mobs for mob , mostly against muslims, but also against christians and muslims who happened to mary and date muslims. this vigilante mob violence is breaking out all over india, it is breaking out in sri lanka. we have seen the massacres and expulsions in me and mark come burma, fueled in by top again to spread on facebook and whatsapp. modi has taken advantage of this. it is a three-part strategy, which i call the authoritarian playbook. use facebook and whatsapp to distribute propaganda about

themselveses, f flooding out alf the discussion about what is going on in politics and government. secondly, the use the same propaganda machines very accucurately targeted to underme their opponents and critics publicly. thirdly, they use them to generate harassment. because you are constantly being accused of pedophilia, you are being threatened with rape, kidnapping, murder, which makes it impossible to perform publicly in a democratic space. he masteredtly what in his campaign in 2014 and a bit before and that same playbook was picked up by rodrigo duterte and it is being used all over ththe world by authoritariaian and nationalist leaders, to greater or lesser degrees. usedtrump's campaign

facebook on most as effectively to precisely target certain voters in certain s states, like michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, florida, and either turn them off from voting or turn them on to voting for donald t trump, when they might otherwise not have been motivated, by choosing targeted, specific issues to turn people on or off from voting, that was a soft, light version of the modi claybrook. hopefully, we will not see the same level of coordinated harassment from the republican party. we at least have not seen it yet. what we have seen in a distributed way, women involved in the public spear -- sphere are being constantly assaulted with these messages of all sorts of threats, both public and privately. the culture of our democracy and the cultures of democracies around the world are directly threatened by these practices that are not only enabled by facebook, but are actually

accelerated by facebook. amy: we are going to break and come back to this discussion and talk about a number of issues, including whether you are concerned about this massive monopoly determining the content we read and see. siva vaidhyanathan is the author of "antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy." professor of media studies and director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia. his previous books include "the googlization of everything." stay with us. ♪ [music break]

amy: "every breath you take" by the police. is democracy now! we are spending the hour with siva vaidhyanathan, the author

of "anantisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy." he speaks to us from charlottesville, from the university of virginia, professor of media studies. and director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia. i want to go back to the beginning of this interview where we talked about facebook taking down more than 30 pages, saying they are not authentic. we immediately got responses from all over saying the protests against the unite the right rally in washington dc in august around the anniversary of the attacks at your university, university of virginia, are real. these protests against unite the right are real. this goes to a very important issue, professor. you now have facebook, this corporation, deciding what we see and what we don't see. it is almost as if they run the telephone company and they are

listening to what we say and deciding what to edit, even if some of the stuff is absbsolutey people are talking to each other about. multinationalis corporation becoming the publisher and seen as that and determining what gets out. yes, there is a protest against unite the right. that is very real. they have taken down one page that might not have been real. what for example what happened if there was a protest against facebook? prof. vaidhyanathan: yes, you can't use facebook to protest againsnst facebook come up by ee way. you can't use facebook to advertise a book about facebook. amy: what do you mean? prof. vaidhyanathan: they will not allow a group or a page or an advertisement to contain the word facebook.k. it is not just to insulate themselves from criticism. that is a nice bonus for them.

it is really because they don't want any sort of implication that the company itself is endorsing any group or page or product. so, the use of the word -- look, the only way facebook operates is algorithmically. make bluntines decisions, so the presence of the word facacebook will knock a group or page down and so you can't use facebook to criticize facebobook. amy: what about your book, which has the word facebook in it? prof. vaidhyanathan: i can't buy ads on facebook about it. that's ok. i ththink i will do ok. [laughter] prof. vaidhyanathan: however, thinking about this notion of the extent to which facebook governs our structures, or sense of awareness, our public sphere, halfook is a place where of americans regularly gets news.

facebook's algorithms decide what we see and what we don't see. it reflects, the algorithms reflect what we havave alreadady told facebook we carare about. so, if we have engageded with te for many now! page years and put comments under items on that page, there is a very good chance that a lot of democracy now! content will show up in the newsfeed. if you deal with breititbart jut as effectively or often, you were going to get a lot of brbreitbart content and a lot ts demomocracy now! content. from facebook's point of view, it makes sense. they want to give you what you want, they want to k keep you hookok on facebook, they want to amplify their effect on your life. like a casino, they are constantly trying to convince if that you will feel better you enengage with facebook.

being reinforced in your beliefs is a lovely feeling. this has a number of effects. it definitely makes us less able to interact with those who differ from us in a humane way, in a respectful way. it is not the only contributor to this phenomenon. it certainly does not help. the more that we perform our politics and try to learn about the world through facebook, the more that we are denying ourselves abroad lens or vision and that is a shame. in addition, facebook has the ability to get hijacked. because what it promotes mostly our items that generate strong emotions. what generates strong emotions? content that is cute or lovely, like puppies or baby goats, but also content that is e extreme, cocontent that is angry, content that is hateful, content that feeds conspiracy theories.

this hateful, angry conspiracy theory collection does nonot jut spread b because peoeople likek. more oftften than not, it spreas because people have problems with it.t. a wackye to post conspiracy theory on facebook today, nine out of the 10 comments that would follow it would be f friends of mine argug against me telling me how stupid i was for posting it. the active commenting on that post amplifies its reach, puts it on more people's newsfeeds, makes it last longer, sit higher. the active arguiuing against the crcrazy amplifies the crazy. it is one of the reasons facebook is a terrible place to deliberate about the world. it is a really effective place if you want to motivate people to all sorts of ends, like getting out to a r rally, but it is terrible if you acactually wt to think and discuss and deliberate about the problems in the world. and what the world needs now more than anything are more opportununities to d deliberate calmly and effectively and with

real information. facebook is working completely against that goal. abouti wanted to ask you the political economy underlying .ocial media per se your book has to be, in my mind, one of the most important nonfiction books of this year, if not of the last decade, because so many people use facebook. 2 2 billion people around the world use it, so it is extremely important for the users especially to look at the mechanics of this monster that has been created over the last decade or so. one of the things that it seemed to me that you did not address is thehe issue of the political economy underlying all of this social media. i think for instance of julian a 's book wheresange

he talks about the dangers of the internet and he goes into this issue of the difference between the platonic view of how the internet and social media work and the actual physical underpinnings, the cable systems, the satellites, the physical structures that make this social media possible and how governments and corporations have, in effect, hijacked the privatizations of the internet, of this communications medium. i'm wondering if you can address how government policy made the development of a google or a facebobook possible. prof. vaidhyanathan: back in the late 1990's, we were sold a vision, a dream of an internet that was a separate phenomenon from our real world. we call this cyberspace. we used spatial metaphors for it. we had people like john perry barlow rhapsodizing about the fact that rules don't apply and

this space will be exempt from both the prejudices of regular human beings and the limitatatis of the state. that never really existed. it was always a dream. commercializeds and structured almost immediately, not extremely at the beginning. and if you remember in the early part of the 21st century, we did have this proliferation of voices, largely through blogs, that was the dominant form of foression for amateurs, voices yet to be heard, for emerging voices come for minority voices, to generate audience and put their message out. it also meant that in those rather innocent days, you could discover new voices from other voices. through links and recommendations.

but nothing was structured by algorithms. nothing was fueled by advertising. at least not effectively. in those days, web advertising did not make anybody any money. google changed that and facebook change that. by 2002, google figured out how to target a ads quite effectivey based on the search terms you had used. by 2007, facebook was starting to build ads into its platform, as well. because it has so much more rich information on our interests and connections and habits and even once we put facebook on our mobile phones, our location, it could trace us to whatever store we went into, whatever church or synagogue or mosque we went into, it could know everything about us. at that point, targeting ads became incredibly efficient and effective and that is what drove the massive revenues for facebook and google. that is why facebook and google have all the advertising money these days. it is why the traditional public

sphere is so impoverished. why it is so hard to pay reporters a living wage. because facebook and google are taking all that money because they developed something better than the display ad of a newspaper or magazine a ad, frankly, but t there was no holding back on that. as a result, once facebook goes big, once twitter emerges around 2009 -- juan: if i could interrupt you on this point, their ability to monetize our use, also doesn't it depend on government's refusal to defend privacy rights? policy decisions that our leaders make that people's privacy rights no longer matter? prof. vaidhyanathan: absolutely. .hat varieies across the globe in europe, there are much stronger data protection laws. as of may 2018, they are much better codified and clear. facebook and google have a harder time targeting people

effectively in europe than they do in the rest of the world. especially in north america. we have no real protections of our data. we have no rights to our own data in the united states, effectively. we are merely rats in a cage or cows in a pasture to facebook and google in the united states, and most of the world. europe is the exception in this case. won't beon, the u.k. part of that exception. it is a a really sad s state of affairs. many of us, for more than a decade, have been calling for strong data protection so that we would be informed as to what our data would be used for. many of us, for more than a and we would be informed and asked for explicit permission every time a company shares of data or gives their dadata or sells theirr data to another party. it has b been impossssible to gt those legislative proposals through legislature because the against data protection

go beyond facecebook and google and include verizon and at&t and t-mobile and comcast. some of those powerful companies in the world are wedded to o ths massive surveillance capitalism model that has enriched facebook andd google. where comcast sees its only hope to be in the advertising business, to compete against facebook and google, to do exactly what they have beeeen doing. comcast very much wants to know as much about u.s. facebook does. it is not there yet, but it hopes to get there. that is one of the reasons we are up against formidable foeoes when we trtry to argue for basic human dignityty and the ability for people to have some say over how they are being used and abused. amy: we are going to break. when we come back, there is a senate intelligence hearing today on facebook and the question that we want to put to you is what do o you think shoud be asked and what should the government be doing to rein in

these corporations? siva vaidhyanathan is the author of "antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines demococracy." professor of media studies and director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia. speaking to us from charlottesville. stay with us. ♪ [music break]

amy: "watching me" by jill scott. democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. juan gonzalez. we continue this hour with siva vaidhyanathan, the author of the book "antisocial media." "guardian"o to your piece that you wrote after the single largest drop in stock

market history. at the end of the piece, you concluded that we cannot depend on market forces to rein in facebook's destructive power. only ars won't save us, global political movement aimed at breaking up that company and limiting what it can do without behavioral data can curb facebook. don't let a one-day drop as part of a remarkable six-year surge in stock value distract you from that difficult truth." siva, why don't you take it from there. on this day of the senate intelligence hearing, talk about what you see as facebook's threat to democracy. what should be done about it? what does it mean to say, break it up? prof. vaidhyanathan: almost all of the maladies that facebook either causes or empathize are the result of scale. facebook got so big, so fast, it

became impossible to govern internally and really difficult to regulate externally. consider that 2.2 billion people use facebook. that was of -- as of february 2018. by january 2019, that could be 2.4 billion people. the growth is actually extremely strong and fast, mostly in places in the world where one would expect and want to see growth. mexico, nigeria, kenya, india, the philippines, indonesia, etc., pakistan. countries where there are a lot of young people, a lot of people getting facebook accounts every month. right now, there are 220 million americans who regularly use a spoke. that is pretty flat. there are 250 people who regularly use -- 250 million people who regularly use

facebook in india. this is a global phenomenon. the united states matters less and less every day. the united states congress has inordinate power over facebook. the fact that its headquarters are here. the fact that the major stock markets of the world a strong attention to what goes on in our country. we have the ability, i if we cad to, , to break up facebook. we would have to revive an older vision of antitrustst, one that takes the overalall health of te body politic seriously, not just the price to consumers seseriously. but we could and should breaeakp facebook. we never s should hahave allowew facebookok to purchaseheh -- ald facebook to purchase whatsapp. we should not have allowed facebook to purchase instagram. if those companies existed separately fromm facebook and te

data were not shared, there might be a chance that market the excessescurb of facebook. we should sever those parts. we should sever the virtual reality project of facebebook called oculus rift. virtual reality has the potential to work its way into all areas of life. pilot training, surgeon training, porornography, shoppi, tourism. in all of these ways, we should be concerned that facebook is likely to control all of the data about one of the more successful and leading virtual reality companies in the world. you can also -- we should also limit what facebook can do with its data. we should have strong data laws. users to know when data

is being used and misused and sold. ultimately, we are going to have to put facebook in its place and in a boxox. we are goingng to have to recognize that facebook brings real value to people around the world. there are not 2.2 billion fools using facebook. there are 2.2 billion people using facebook because it brings value to their lives. andn, those puppy pictures news of a cousin's graduation. there are areas where facebebook is going to be the entire media system. sri lanka. increasingly in india,a, facebok is everything and we cannot dismiss that, as well. amy: for example, you talked about burma, it is more expensive to get internet on your phone if you are trying to

outside ofte facebook. it is free to use facebook services on your phone. prof. . vaidhyanathan: the use f facebook does not count against your data cap in myanmar and 40 other cocountries in the world, the poorest places in the world. they are becoming facebook dependent at a rapid rate. facebook put this plan forward as a philanthropic arm. one could looook at it cynically and say, y you are just try to build customers, but the people who run facebook are true believers that the more people who use facebook for more hours a day, the better humanity will be. i think we have shown otherwise. i know my book shows otherwise. we have allowed facebook to build this terrible monster that is taking great advantage of the people who are most honorable -- vulnerable. juan: i think also that of the importance of your book is that while you concentrate on

facebook, you make the point over and over that it is not just facebook. i want to go to the section that talks about technolop -- technopoly. you go on to say, "like the east india company, the excuse their zeal and umbrage around the world by appealing to the missionary spirit. they are, after all, making the world better, right? they did all this by inviting us in, tricking us into allowing them to make use of their means t to wealth and power, distilling our activivits and identities into data, and launching a major ideological movement. what the famous nyu oly ---- aled technop

state of culture and also a state of mind that consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology." you could say this about uber bnb, these people who say data and technology will save the world. prof. vaidhyanathan: right, it is a false religion. we need to re-humanize ourselves. that is the long hard work. i could propose regulatory interventions that would make a difference, but they would not make enough difference. we haveo take oururselves out of the habit of techno -fundamentalism. if we really want to limit the damage facebook has done, we have to invest our time and

money in institutions that help us think, that help us think clearly, that can certify truth, that can host debate. ,nstitutions like journalism institutions like universities, public libraries, schools. we need to put our time and our energy into face-to-face politics, so we can look of opponents in the eye and recognize them as humans, and perhaps achieve e some sort of mutual understanding and respect. without that, we have no hope for engaging with people only through the smallest of screens, we have no ability to recognize the humanity in each other, and no ability to think clearly. we cannot think collectively or truthfully, we can't think. we need to rebuild, if we ever had it, our ability to think.

that is ultimately the take away of my book. i hope we can figure out better, richer ways to thihink. we are going to have facebook for a long time and we might learn to use it better and we might rein it in a little that, but the big job is to train ourselves to think better. amy: so, let me ask you about wechat in china. wechat is everything. paypal, google, instagram all rolled into one. you write that it has infused itself into their lives in ways facebook wishes it could. you are talking abouout one billion people using it. how does it differ from facebook , what does it mean, what does it tell us about the future? prof. vaidhyanathan: right. wechat is facebook and everytything else. your phone might have 30 applications on it, you probably use sisix or seven regularly.

if you lived and worked in china and had wechat, you would not need all those applications. your banking, your library, your retail, all of these apps would be folded into wechat. you can use it at vending machines, to makake medical appointments, to navigate daily life. how is that different from facebook? well, it is clearly what facebook aspspires to be. if you have opened up the facebook messenger app on the phone, it has a number of micro-applications at the bottom. facebook's first foray into developing an application like wechat. facebook is constantly nudging us to use facebook messenger more and more. that is their long-tererm strategy.

the other part of their long-term strategy is mark zuckerberg wants to get into the chinese market. that is the one placace in the world he cannot do business effectively. he would love to take on wechat directly. here is the big difference. wechat, like every other application in china, answers to the people's republic of china. there is constant, full surveillance by the government. wechat cannot operate without that. facebook seems to be willing to negotiate on that point. if facebook became more like we it is very likely that it would have to cut very strong agreements around the world with governments around the world that would allow for maybe not chinese level of surveillance, but certainly a dangerous level of surveillance and licensing. again, we might not sweat that in the united states or western europe, where we still have some basic civil liberties

come at least most of us do, but people in turkey, egypt, india should be very worried about that trend. juan: what about the issue that has been much-publicized of the role of facebook and twitter and other social media in protest movements, in dissident movements around the world, whether it is an eject -- egypt or other parts of the world? prof. vaidhyanathan: i think one of the great tragedies of this story is thahat we were misled into thinking social media played a direct and motivating role in the upuprisings of 2011. in fact, almost nobody in egypt used twitter at the time. the handful of people who did were cosmopolitans who livived n cairo. what they did, they used twitter to inform the rest of the world, especially journalists what was going on in egypt. it was not used to organize protests. neither was facebook. for the simple reason that the

government watches facebook, right? the government watches twitter? if you want to organize a protest out of the eyes of the governmement, the worst thing yu can do is use facebook or twitter. in addition, when we think about the arab spring, the alleged arab spring -- amy: a and here in the united states? prof. vaidhyanathan: a lot has changed between 2011 and 2018. facebook isact that now fairly universal. now, it has many millions of users in egypt that it did n not have in 2011. it was notot new to arabic in 2010. it just introduced its arabic service in 2010. by 2018 and for the last few years, you can go back to the occupy movements, which were not facebook driven, but facebook enhanced, you see that activists used facebook very well. it is true. facebook can be really valuable for motivation. you do not want to use facebook

in an authoritarian environment. that is the important distinction. organize a to teacher strike in the united states or the women's march on partygton dc or the tea uprisings in the united states, facebook is really great. almost everybody in the u.s. is on facebook. it is wonderful for identifying like-minded people and motivating them. it is great for motivation, terrible for deliberation. a democratic republic needs both. of the statee using it. i want to ask you about recent reports that memphis police used fake accounts to monitor black activists. the guardian reports that a trove of documents released by the city of memphis late last week appeared to show that its police department has been systematically using fake social media profiles to survey a local black lives matter activists and ththat it kept dossiers and detailed presentations on dozens of memphis area activists alongg

with lists of known associates. the report reveals a fake profile named bob smith was used to join private groups and posee as an activist. we have just 30 seconds. prof. vaidhyanathan: yes, any police department, any state security service in the world that does not infiltltrate prott groups or activist groups that way is foolish. it is so easy. facebook makes surveillance so easy. my friends who do activism, especially human rights activism , and parts of the wororld that are authoritarian, the first thing they tell people is get off of facebook. use e other services to coordine your activities. use analog services and technologies. facebook is the worst possible way to stay out of the gaze of the state. it is great for momotivating people to get into the street, but don't be surprised if there are a couple of guys with crew cuts in the crowd with you. amy: we want to thank you for

being with us. siva vaidhyanathan. his new book, "antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy." professor of media studies at the university of virginia. that does it for our show. democracy now! is looking for feedback froçç??

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