What A Big Tech Whistleblower Learned About Power
2026-10-10 09:55:00 • 1:01:06
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We decided to have maybe like a public whistleblower,
like maybe five weeks before the first
Western Journal story came out.
I was like in this pit of despair,
I mean like I cannot escape the circumstances that I am in.
I never ever thought in my wildest dreams
that like my story might inspire an AI
whistleblower one day.
How much of what went wrong at Facebook
do you blame on Mark Zuckerberg personally
and how much was baked into the structure
and incentives of the company?
Ooh.
And how much are those two intertwined?
Right.
We ran an experiment where we stopped
sending kids notifications during the school day,
stopped sending them late at night,
kids have said they're less stressed,
there's no point in us launching this though
because they spend 1% fewer minutes a month.
And Mark has said that's all he cares about.
One thing I wish we were seeing more
from the current kind of crop of AI whistleblowers,
we get a lot of accounts.
We are not getting a lot of what I would call data
or like evidence.
The only place where you can really study these things
where the conversations are fully happening
is behind those closed doors.
If you are going to leave,
like we need your help trying to bootstrap
more of that public understanding,
the thing that the government provides
is kind of like the ref who says like,
yeah, like that car actually has fewer fatalities
or when we did crash tests,
the dummy's got less damage.
Like we should be asking what is the crash test dummy of AI?
What do you do when being right isn't enough to change what's wrong?
You speak up, you make your case,
you show people the evidence,
but what happens when they believe you
and still don't act?
What do you do then?
Francis Hagen knows this dilemma better than most.
Five years ago,
she was a data scientist at Facebook
who became convinced the company was dismissing serious dangers
that its own researchers had discovered.
So she copied thousands of pages of internal documents,
gave them to journalists and regulators,
and eventually revealed herself as the whistleblower behind
what became known as the Facebook files.
This week her story is getting the full Aaron Sorkin treatment
in the social reckoning,
a follow-up to the social network
based on Hagen's memoir, The Power of One.
Sure enough,
the movie has a classic Hollywood story
about one brave person taking on a big powerful corporation.
But the more I've thought about Hagen's story,
the more I've realized that the Hollywood version
leaves out the most important part.
Facebook's problem wasn't that no one inside the company
knew anything was wrong.
They knew a lot.
Their own researchers knew that Instagram
could harm teenage girls who struggle with body image issues.
Their own employees warned that Facebook's algorithm
was poisoning our political climate,
fueling hate speech and violence in other countries.
These people knew the risks,
they knew the dangers,
they had the evidence,
but being right wasn't enough.
For Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook senior leaders,
all those warnings and studies collided with other pressures
to keep people on the platforms,
to grow the company,
to beat the competition,
to generate more profit.
They ultimately had to decide how much money and influence
they were willing to sacrifice
in order to prevent harms that were harder to measure
and might not happen for years.
And the answer turned out to be very little.
Five years later,
the Francis Huggins who work in artificial intelligence
are wrestling with an even harder question.
What if the people in charge of your company
are also warning about the dangers
and that's still not enough?
Anthropic founder, Dario Amade,
has repeatedly sounded the alarm
about the potentially catastrophic risks
of developing AI that we may not be able to control.
And a common response has been,
why don't you just stop then?
Why don't you just decide on your own to slow down?
Well,
what if Anthropic slows down
but open AI doesn't?
What if Google doesn't?
What if China doesn't?
The truth is problems that affect all of us
cannot be solved by any one of us.
Not by one whistleblower who exposes the truth.
Not by one CEO who wants to do the right thing.
You don't ask the nicest factory owner
to stop dumping poison into the river
while all their competitors get to keep doing it.
You make dumping poison into the river illegal.
These kinds of problems,
whether it's pollution or AI or future pandemics,
require convincing a lot of people
who may not agree on much else
to come together and figure out what happens next.
Pass the law, sign the agreement,
join the strike, file the lawsuit,
show up, vote,
because being right about something
isn't the same as having the power to change it.
For most of us,
the place where we now experience politics every day
is on the very social media platforms
that Francis Hagen warned us about.
We operate in an information environment
that primarily rewards us
for successfully expressing
and proving what we believe.
You post the take,
you bring the receipts,
you expose the hypocrisy,
the like start rolling in and pretty soon,
you're on the winning side of a viral exchange.
Cool.
Now what?
What did you actually convince all those people to do?
Did someone decide to vote?
Did more people join an organization?
Did enough politicians change their minds?
If not, what's the plan to replace them?
What's the plan to build enough power
to actually bring about the change that you want?
None of this means one person's choices don't matter.
They have to.
Collective action has to begin somewhere
with somebody,
which brings me back to the power of one.
Hagen said she often thinks about Vachlav Havill,
the Czech playwright and dissident
who helped lead the movement
that brought down communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
Years before that happened.
Havill wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless.
About what an individual can do inside a system
that seems too big and powerful to change.
His answer wasn't that one person
could bring down the system alone.
It was that you could refuse to participate in its lies.
You could make a different choice.
And when other people saw you do that,
it could change what they believed was possible for themselves.
Hagen put it this way.
People see that you've reclaimed a little bit of your own life
and it actually changes how they live.
And maybe that's the real power of one.
Not the ability to fix everything yourself,
but to make someone else believe that they can act too.
And then someone else.
Until enough of us are acting together
that the people in charge have no choice
but to finally change.
My guess this week is Francis Hagen,
whose decision to blow the whistle on Facebook
became one of the biggest tech stories of the last decade,
and one which is now the subject of Aaron Sorkin's new movie,
The Social Reckoning.
We talked about what it was like for her to see her life
dramatized on the big screen,
what she learned from trying to change Facebook from the inside,
and what she tell the growing number of AI employees
who are now wrestling with many of the same questions.
We also get into whether whistle blowing actually works,
what it takes to hold powerful tech companies accountable
and how one person speaking up can sometimes
get a whole lot of other people to act.
Here's Francis Hagen.
Francis, welcome to the show.
Thank you for inviting me.
Happy to be here.
So you've had quite a journey over the last five years.
You've gone from Facebook,
Data Engineer to Whistleblower to author and advocate to
as of this week, the central character of an Aaron Sorkin movie
based on your memoir.
What was it like to watch the Hollywood version
of one of the strangest and probably most stressful periods
of your life?
You know, the first time I got to see the movie was maybe
three weeks ago.
So they called me on Thursday and they're like,
are you by chance in LA in the next week?
And I'm like, no, I live in Puerto Rico.
Like I'm thousands of miles away.
I'm just by chance in LA.
And so they had me come out and for like 36 hours
and come see the movie.
And I saw it at Sony Studio,
this little time screen room by myself.
And it's, I think the thing that it captures really,
really well is kind of the stakes.
So when I was blowing the whistle,
like I wasn't that worried about like legal consequences
because Facebook had never, they never sued anyone until
Sarah Wynne Williams published careless people.
But I did, I was so afraid of getting caught because I knew
if I got caught, they would close the doors behind me
and no one else would ever get to try.
And so they really caught capture kind of that intensity
and they also capture kind of like the magic.
So when I started working with Jeff,
there were things I knew for sure.
And there were things that were like known unknowns.
And that kind of like excitement of discovery
as like the puzzle pieces like click in the place.
Like I thought the movie did a really good job of capturing.
Like it really did feel magical while we were figuring out
what was going on.
So the movie is framed as a, you know, David and Goliath story
about one employee you taking on one of the world's most powerful companies.
Is that how it felt to you at the time?
You know, at the time, it, you know, people have used the words
like hero before with me.
And I always feel really uncomfortable about it because like the way
what, when I was going through what it felt like was Facebook
had put me in an impossible position.
So like I joined the company thinking I was going to work on
like prep for the 2020 election.
And I got there and got exposed to like the Facebook
was just very openly aware that choices they had made or lack of action
was putting lives at risk in countries and places like Africa
or Southeast Asia.
Like the genocide in Myanmar had happened in the previous like 18 months.
We're 25,000 people had died.
And I felt like I had no choice.
Right.
Like I was, I was either, they made me culpable because now I knew.
And I had this fear that if I did nothing, I would lay in bed in 20 years
as I watched kind of the culmination of all these things that were already
moving inside the company, come to fruition.
And then I would, I would never be able to forgive myself.
And so the, I think it's, I think they did a really good job of capturing
kind of that feeling of being torn, right, that I really love social
software.
I really wanted Facebook to succeed.
And knowing that there was like this festering rot happening in the company.
When you first got to the company, you know, I know you specifically wanted to work
on, you know, misinformation, potential harms caused by the platforms.
Like what made you believe that you could help the company fix those problems
from the inside and when did that belief start to break down?
Going into Facebook.
So a detail is different between like what happened to Francis in real life versus
Francis the character is, you know, I had been in the industry for about,
I think about 15 years by the time I was at Facebook.
So I had worked on it at Google on a variety of different search engines.
I had been the lead product manager on picking out the pins and your home feed on Pinterest.
I had worked at Yelp.
Like Facebook was my fourth social network.
So I worked on Google Plus as well.
And I knew going in that like even during the 2016 elections,
like I had been looking at Facebook and just seen the features.
So I'll give you an example.
It used to be that when you would like click like on a post,
a little carousel would pop out underneath that post showing other stories you might want to engage with.
And it was very, very clear to someone who designs like algorithm products that the way those stories were picked
was based on like their click through rate, like how likely they were going to get a click.
Because it was like you would click on some very reasonable normal AP newswire story.
And you would get like the most fantastical variant of it.
So you might click something about Catholic church and you get like Pope and Dorses Donald Trump as the first worry.
Like very clearly this is like for shock value, how things are picked.
And so like I had this suspicion that if I was on the inside and I was working on algorithms like
you know, I never expected to be like the person who could solve everything.
But I thought I could make a positive difference.
And I viewed it as like I think everyone in tech should do some kind of either civil service or volunteer the nonprofit at some point in their career
because we're giving so many opportunities.
I figured this is like an easy way to give back that doesn't require me you know,
spending time in Washington or something like that.
And when did it start dawning on you that you know, this is the efforts that you were putting into this.
We're not going to bear fruit inside the company.
To give you like a sense of the chaos.
So you know, imagine you show up.
You've never really thought about the idea that like software could lead to genocide.
Yeah, right.
Like you know, this is kind of huge gap.
Like I've been helping people people pick out their dinners at Pinterest and like have pretty bedrooms.
And like now you're like, oh, and by the way, like you can cause ethnic violence with very similar products.
Imagine you've like been on this crash course where like you're meeting all the time with the researchers who have been going in and out of these countries and are like, you know,
those PhDs in in in in how societies fall apart.
Imagine you've just like kind of bootstrapped from from zero to one over like three months.
And you get called into a room and told you know how your team of like five or six is already a little bit traumatized by like having to be exposed to all this.
Just ignore it.
We have a bigger problem.
We have just found a Russian foreign influence operation that is trying to send misinformation specifically to police officers in the United States.
You're not going to work on civil strife somewhere in Africa.
You're going to work on targeted misinformation in the US election.
Like like think of think of like one, I mean, I understand why that's a huge problem like I live here.
People with guns.
Sounds like you shouldn't be targeting them with misinformation.
Like that sounds like a reasonable problem.
But but just imagine the level of fluidity where like you literally are forced to make choices of allocating resources at that level.
Right.
Like oh, that it doesn't matter what the stakes are on this thing.
We have so few people to go around that this is what we're doing.
And it it it.
I think within six months of being there, I was like the level of chaos here is is very unlikely to be conducive to solving these problems.
But then COVID hit right.
So like a detail it's different from the movie versus real life is I joined in 2019.
I didn't start blowing the whistle until after like until 20 December of 2020.
And so I I think like a lot of us I kind of I chose to focus on the present and and getting through COVID.
And it wasn't until our team got dissolved that my mind kind of shifted into gear being like, oh, actually, if we want to solve these problems, we're going to have to go outside the company.
I think the most striking thing to me about the Facebook files, you know, it wasn't that Facebook didn't know that its product was causing harm.
It's the company did know.
And continually, as you said, either made decisions to not try to alleviate those harms or change the algorithm or or do what was necessary or just did not altogether.
Just ignored the concerns that they knew about that their research was showing them.
Why wasn't knowing I think a lot of people like outside the company would be like, okay, well, if they had research that showed them this was a problem.
If they had these studies that showed them this is a problem like why wasn't that enough.
One of the things that's been really nice about the court cases that have played out over the last few years is that we have been able to get access to like a much broader sample of internal documents than even I brought out.
So, you know, the documents that I brought out were largely focused around this question of like societal instability, biases and algorithms, pushing people towards either extremist groups or just extremist content.
And so, you know, I think that's what I think about the content.
Um, uh, impacts on like fact that content moderation doesn't really work the way described like it struggles to find the bad stuff.
It takes a lot of good stuff.
Facebook is very non transparent about what actually worked or didn't work.
But when it comes to kids, you know, maybe 10% of what I brought out was about kids.
And one of the things that it's been super interesting about what's been released through the court cases is that we've actually been able to get, you know, the exact documents where they talk about this is what we learned.
This is what we're going to do. This is why.
And the thing that you see over and over again is a disconnect between how success was defined in the company and what the actual consequences were externally.
And I think on a, if I was going to really sum up in like a one sentence or two sentence description of the problem set of Facebook was that Facebook wanted to believe that they could be objective and how they manage the company by picking a few metrics and then just making decisions using those numbers.
And when we manage with metrics instead of context and intuition and like more of a holistic way of making decisions.
We end up cutting corners and people have been talking a lot about the paper clip problem with AI, you know, that the AI will go out there and you know, be like make more paper clips and it just happens to be that like your home is competing for resources with like more paper clips.
Facebook on a much smaller scale like came in there and said the number of minutes is all that matters.
And so many minutes are kids spending our adults spending on Instagram each month.
We have very, very clearly written documents that say we ran an experiment where we stopped sending kids notifications during the school day, we stopped sending them late at night, kids have said they're less stressed.
There's no point in us launching this though because they spend 1% fewer minutes a month and Marcus said that's all he cares about.
So the focus on metrics at the expense of almost everything else at the expense of, you know, trying to quantify harms that were probably more diffuse, difficult to measure, maybe delayed, right?
Like they weren't going to have for a while.
Yeah.
And that sort of caused a lot of the problems.
I'm like, very curious what the conversations were like inside the company because clearly when someone raised, you know, we're worried that Instagram is causing body image issues or we're worried that because we don't have content moderation in some of these developing countries with Facebook that things are getting out of control.
What are those conversations like inside the company when someone pushes back and says, well, yeah, maybe that could be an issue, but, you know, is it, is it as simple as like, no, we need to focus on engagement and growth or is it a little more complicated than that?
You know, it's one of the things that is going to seem cartoonish. If you watch the movie is there's a scene where one employee is coaching the French is having character that like the whole point of Facebook is to remove friction where everything is optimized for remove friction said company and when you complain, you are friction.
And you're just going to yourself removed.
And like that scene feels so reductive.
But like I remember when I first joined and like, it was just weird the vibe you would get talking to people like it's it's very clear that people assimilate over time to the notion that like you are rewarded for focusing on the positive.
You are rewarded for having a mindset of like, why does it why don't people acknowledge all the good we do instead of like, you know, can we reduce the amount of bad for the same amount of good.
And I like one of the posts I brought out it had been actually leached before by other people like it was not news when I brought it out, but it's within the cash of documents that I brought.
Is a blog post that was posted by the CTO of the company, boss worth maybe maybe 2019 maybe 2018 and in it he's talking about people complaining about a child having committed suicide.
So this is like a 15 16 year old they've unfortunately harmed themselves.
And he's talking about how what the work of Facebook is so important that it basically doesn't matter.
Right like like that like some people are going to die like because of the power that they've unleashed on the world.
And the reality is that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
And I think you really have to take a step back and ask like, how is it possible that like a culture like this gets normalized.
And I think part of it is, you know, they say like the the sign of like an advanced mind is to be able to hold to conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time.
Right like like a key thing to be a critical thinker is that the two ideas can be true.
Even if they're in conflict and or intention and you know Facebook does create a huge amount of good in the world right is created magical moments as connected people who were disconnected.
And so that's the only people like the frances character says you know some people are awkward they have trouble connecting.
We can bring them together with the internet.
And and people are also getting hurt.
And I think if Mark were a more mature leader he would say hey, we have lots of tools that are supposed to reduce that harm.
So for example, I was a not all kids are at high risk of damage from Instagram.
That is a controversial statement like some people some psychokillic colleges would disagree with me.
But imagine you were more actively looking for the 10% or 20% that are at highest risk.
And you were intervening if you saw that things were getting worse.
For example, a lot of these kids who do harm themselves by the time they they do something drastic maybe half of their feed is self harm content.
Why are you not getting someone involved when it's 10% when it's 5% of their feed.
Right, we have tools that are disposal is just a lack of action is happening.
More of my conversation with Francis Hogan in just a minute.
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How much of it is this rationalization that I've heard from all kinds of people at Facebook publicly that you know this is sort of a town square and people who are not interested in the world.
And people are or even if you go beyond the town square thing, people are going to make their own decisions.
And we can't police everything.
We can't force people to make good decisions.
We have this platform and then people are going to decide what they want to do.
And so we can't solve every problem or heal every person or make sure that there's no harm if someone's going to choose to stay on the platform to seek out these.
These, you know, political groups that are extreme if they're going to seek out content and Instagram that makes them feel bad like we just can't do anything about all of that.
How much do you think people inside the company sort of lean on that justification and rationalization and also maybe truly believe it.
So I think there is definitely an internal culture that really encourages people to stay in their lane.
So any given quarter, any given half, you are going to have your specific stated goals.
And if you achieve those goals, you're going to be rewarded if you choose something else that isn't on that state goals is you you may not be rewarded, especially if you miss the goals that you were assigned.
I'll give you an example where like there's this question of there are problems that are genuinely hard that I don't think will ever solve.
And I don't think they should try to solve them.
For example, there is going to be offensive content on social media.
You know, we are not like I do not want to live in a world where I never encounter offensive content on social media because it means you have to take down lots and lots of good stuff to make it that clean.
So example, one of the documents I brought out talked about how terrorism content in Arabic 75% of counter terrorism content.
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And so there are a lot of things that are not going to be done in this case.
And so there are a lot of things that are not going to be done in this case.
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Carol, we trust you.
You can say anything you want.
But if you want to spread Alice's message,
you have to copy and paste it and put it in the share box.
You can't just hit reshare.
We're going to make you have a moment of reflection
before you spread that information onwards.
And that small pause ends up having the same impact
on misinformation that the entire third party
fact checking program has.
Right, that's the power of design.
And when we talk about kids getting hurt,
one of the things that came out from the court cases
was Facebook was analyzing who is receiving unwanted sexual
communications.
So this is something that's like a nude photo, we might say.
When they looked at who is receiving them,
over half the reports came from kids,
even though half of users were not kids.
And of those, over half of them were from adults
the kids didn't know.
Why was an adult who sent an unwanted sexual
communication even once allowed to do it a second time?
Why weren't they at least put in time out for three months
and said, you can't talk to kids for a couple of months.
Right?
Or like, we're going to manually check this
and see if you have a history of these things.
A recurrent response.
And why was that?
It's like, yeah.
Like, why do you think that?
I don't know.
I, that's the wild thing.
And that's why they lost their lawsuit.
Let's be totally honest.
Right.
Because like when a jury looked at these things,
they said, how was this ever considered
a reasonable decision?
How much of what went wrong at Facebook?
Do you blame on Mark Zuckerberg personally?
And how much was baked into the structure
and incentives of the company?
Ooh.
And how much are those two intertwined?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So one of the reasons why I'm very happy
with how the movie turned out is the movie, yes.
Part of it is inspired by what I went through.
And like, that's definitely an exciting,
like, heist, like, kind of part of the movie.
But there's like a parallel part of the movie,
which is a kind of a scene of life of what
is it like to be Mark?
Right?
Because Mark is a very unique human
in that there's very, very few people in the world
who has to have as much power as him
and so little accountability.
Right.
Because he has more than half the votes
that control Facebook.
All the people around him are only
have their jobs because they make him happy.
So they have to constantly be kind of
weighing like, how much do I push you?
Right.
Like, how uncomfortable.
How much can I make you grow?
Right.
And I think part of why there is this culture
that tries to abstract things to like,
did the metric go up?
I think that partially is because it allows them
to have a more, you know, it's more frictionless.
Right.
Like, once you agree on like, what the goalposts are,
you say, you know, we're going to let people run free.
Like, we believe in empowering people
to make whatever decisions they think are best
to accomplish that shared goal.
It just happens to me now you don't
have to have a conversation about side effects.
Because you're not going to move those goalposts very often.
They keep the same metrics over multiple years often,
even when new information comes through.
I think the last thing is the people who were looking
into those kinds of complaints, the reality is receiving
an unwanted sexual message is a less common problem
than someone getting locked out of Facebook
or someone trying to spam Facebook.
At Facebook, resources are allocated not
necessarily based on severity of the problem,
but on prevalence, drawing more attention to a problem
or the danger of false positives.
You know, there's a throwaway line in the movie
about Facebook carrying more about the blowback
of a false positive and carrying about the impact
of actually taking something down.
And I think that is a real intense fear of the company.
If Zuckerberg had resigned in 2021,
you think the company would have behaved much differently?
I do.
I do think it would have.
Like, one of the things that's kind of, I think, sad for me
because I love social software.
Is let's imagine it's not he had resigned in 2021,
he had resigned in 2017.
Right?
Like, think of how many more people used Facebook
on a regular basis in 2017 than use it today,
at least in the States.
Right?
We'd see probably more content from our friends.
We'd have different kinds of experiences there.
When you went to Jeff Horowitz at the Wall Street Journal,
you copied the documents, you gave them to him.
When you made them public, what did you hope would happen?
What was your, as he was about to hit publish on those stories,
what did you think the outcome would be?
What did you hope the outcome would be?
Yeah.
So I was a realist in 2021.
I'm a student of history.
I really like, I was a Cold War studies minor.
I like American history.
This is not a false of the political parties
that in power right now.
Every Congress for the last 25 years,
each progressive Congress has passed fewer bills.
We have certain kinds of structural challenges
that come from our Constitution and just the nature of how
our society is set up.
They make it very hard for us to do new things these days.
And so I assumed there would be a lawsuit,
because we'd seen it with opiates, we'd seen it with tobacco.
This is like a common consumer protection pattern.
I thought the level of evidence made it fairly likely
that would take place.
And then I assumed Europe would take action.
And I would say I spent much, much more time
working on legislation in Europe over the first two years
after I came forward than I did in the United States.
And the thing that is nice is that they did
pass the Digital Services Act, which is the first law
anywhere in the world that says that the public has a right
to know things like, if your content is taken down,
like that should be publicly reported.
We should be able to understand if there's biases
in what they let us see or not see.
They have that right.
We don't have that right.
Your story feels newly relevant today
because of what's happening in the AI industry.
You mentioned this earlier.
I just read New York Magazine just interviewed
a bunch of former employees at OpenAI and Foropic,
Google DeepMind, who are wrestling with almost exactly
the same question you faced, which is,
am I more useful staying inside and trying
to change the company or leaving and sounding the alarm?
What would you tell someone at an AI company
by having that debate right now?
How do you know whether internal dissent
is actually working in the best choice
and how do you know when it's time to leave?
I think it's going to be very different for each person
in their circumstances because part of this
is a question of skills, especially a question of credibility
and it's a question of how new is the information.
So I do strongly encourage people who find themselves
in circumstances where it is causing them
a lot of emotional toil to continue working.
You have no obligation to sacrifice yourself
for a community to work on these problems.
You should take care of yourself first.
But I do think there is one thing I wish we were seeing more
from the current kind of crop of AI whistleblowers
is we get a lot of accounts.
We are not getting a lot of what I would call data
or like evidence.
So there's a scene very early in the movie
where the Jeff's character tells the Francis character.
All you've given me is a story, right?
Like you haven't given me, like I don't have proof.
And one of the things that is hard right now,
this is like part of why we need to be passing laws
to give the public the right to ask questions
and get information from these companies
is we are dealing with a really big information asymmetry.
So just like you currently cannot take
even an undergraduate level class
on how to manage a social network,
basically anywhere in the world, you can't take
an undergraduate class on managing a frontier AI model, right?
Like we are the only place where you can really study these things
where the conversations are fully happening
is behind those closed doors.
And so I think there is a question of if you are going to leave,
like we need your help trying to bootstrap
more of that public understanding.
And you know, academia and I hope more journalists help try
to scaffold how we can get more of that shared understanding.
But we also need documentation.
Like how are these things being done internally
so that we, it makes the conversation much more concrete.
One of the former open AI employees described colleagues
saving their chips, which is holding on to influence
because they imagine there will be some decisive future moment
when they'll finally use it.
Did you see any version of that at Facebook
or did you feel like,
I got to, maybe I should hold on a little bit more
because I might be able, if I stay here long enough,
I may be able to either fix the problem
or influence them or change something internally.
Like how do you think about that tension?
What an interesting concept.
I guess part of why that makes sense
from like a game theory perspective is like,
things are accelerating so fast when it comes to these AI models.
I think for me inside the company,
I would say it had been at a steady boil point
for a couple of years.
Right, so like, you know, Myanmar happened in 2018, 2017.
We had not yet seen Ethiopia until after
I'd started accumulating documents.
So I was on a task force that was working on,
like we could see that Ethiopia was about to boil over
for context, there was a civil war there
that was largely a fan by social media
and about half a million people, but, you know,
we were seeing kind of the wave was coming,
but it hadn't really crested yet.
And January 6th then happened yet.
And so I don't think I encountered anyone who like had
that kind of like, oh, I can see the things are getting
so much worse than like waiting six months
or waiting a year actually would make a material difference.
I think the larger issue was we had four years of track record
already of watching people try to get the system to move.
So there's a scene in the movie where they bring to Mark Zuckerberg
this plan for the 2020 election.
It's a result of a task force.
I was on that task force.
I was never in the room.
They show me in the room in the movie.
I was never there.
But I did contribute to it
where they're saying, hey, what's imagine interventions
beyond just taking down content?
Like what are all the other kind of dials that we could tweak
that would make things less bad?
What are those soft actions?
Not just hard actions.
And those kinds of moments like that,
they've been trying lots of that systematically for four years.
And there was kind of a feeling that occasionally
you'd be able to push something through,
like maybe the vibes would just like just right that day
and you could get like a little bit more,
but it was never anyone who felt like they were going to have
a unique moment where that was going to be possible in the future.
Yeah, I think about this a lot because,
you know, you hear this with a lot of these,
the reaction to sort of the warnings
from these AI employees.
And you know, understandably,
some of the reaction is like, well, then just quit the,
why aren't they all quitting?
You know, or like why aren't you,
just stop building it.
And you know, then you hear, well,
they think that they can have a bigger influence
inside the company and then people will, you know,
laugh and be like, well, that's crazy
and they're just doing it to make money or this or that
or because they're scared.
And you know, I will say that just it's slightly different,
but there's a parallel like the difference
between the first Trump term and the second Trump term.
I remember thinking in the first Trump term,
like why are these people there?
They should quit and they should speak out.
And then in the second Trump term, I'm like, you know,
I understand why I understand why a lot of those people,
they were there.
Were there.
Like it was, it's not great that they made that choice,
but it was, you know, probably good for the country.
They were there and it's much worse now.
To be super honest, like I think sometimes about
whether or not I should go work at Anthropic, right?
Like I have such a specialized skill set.
Rather, there's not a ton of people
who work in the space that I work in.
And like the realities, like these systems
are being built today.
Like it's not like they're not trying.
The question is, is there enough
and when red flags appear, are they listened to?
And I think we've seen a couple rounds of these stories
where safety employees have said,
no, no, we detected XYZ and we still launch the model, right?
One of the key things is like,
there's a bunch of tech that is being built right now
where I don't think we have enough people
in the world working on it.
Right?
Like these are hard problems.
They're not obvious.
And, you know, I can totally imagine someone being
in a really conflicted place,
where depending on what your role was within that company
and which company,
because I think each of the frontier labs
have behaved in different ways.
It is really complicated trying to say,
what is your appropriate role?
But I want to clarify, there's also jobs
like working on ads at Facebook.
Like it's really hard to tell me how you are
like making the world a better place working on ads
at Facebook.
I'm sure there's some equivalent thing at Anthropic
where it's like, you are definitely accelerating
in the speed of which the model goes.
You're not putting the brakes on.
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Isn't the bigger problem relying on individual
or even corporate responsibility that's voluntary here?
Because at Facebook, you and other employees
struggle to get leadership to do the right thing
or to want to do the right thing.
It feels like, at least with Anthropic,
you've got the leadership being like,
yeah, I want to slow down, regulate us,
and then the response is, well, then just do it.
You're doing it yourself.
But it's like, what happens when slowing down
means a competitor gets ahead,
what happens when it means if all the US company
slow down and China gets ahead,
isn't the larger issue that you need rules and agreements
that everyone follows, which is,
I thought what governments are for?
Yeah, the movie is partially inspired or based on,
or in terms of source material,
how I contributed the most to the movie was I wrote
a memoir called The Power of One,
which came out a couple years ago.
And when I wrote that, the thing I really, really focused on
was trying to understand, why is it known
as like Apple is ruining the world?
Or like, why are there no Apple whistleblowers?
Like I wanted to look back at like,
like so for Facebook, there's constantly whistleblowers.
Like people call me the Facebook whistleblower.
There are far too many whistleblowers in Facebook
for me to be the Facebook whistleblower.
But you don't see that from Apple.
And even from Google, until they started doing more in AI,
you very rarely saw Google whistleblowers.
So like, why is it so different?
I don't think it's as simple as like Facebook is evil,
or like Mark is evil.
I think the key difference is Facebook
is just the first kind of hint of this giant change
in our economy.
So our economy and the rituals of safety and oversight
that we built up over like three or 400 years, right?
Like we've been making safe and safe corporations
since like the Dutch were like making corporations,
like build dikes and the Netherlands and reclaim the sea,
right?
This is like a long term processing.
When you make a bunch of widgets, be it a car,
be it your coffee mug,
my coffee mug, your coffee mug, they're from the same line,
I can test the paint on my coffee mug and say,
like, hey, we have a problem, like these coffee mugs are rad.
Like what the coffee mug is is not really in conversation.
Even when it comes to Google, because Google is a product
that is basically the same for you and me,
like for most searches, you get the basically the same results.
There's little bits of personalization for things
like I always pick the same time zone converter,
because I don't like the one Google recommends.
They will bump that up a little bit
if you click on it enough times, right?
But because it is basically the same for most people,
an academic can go and run 10,000 searches against Google
and come back and say there is this systemic bias in Google.
There is a Google, right?
But when it comes to Facebook,
because everyone's experience on Facebook is different
or on Instagram, everyone's experience is different.
People would come to Meta and say,
hey, you have this problem recommending
just order content to kids.
And they would say that's so sad, I'm so sorry,
but that's not a representative experience on our platform.
And people couldn't argue back,
because what it is is really hard to establish
if you can't see behind the curtain.
I think one of the best, best signs we are seeing
is five years ago, when I was before the Senate,
I said, you need to have embedded observers
in these companies that have full access to data like employees.
And the thing that people like Anthropic
have been asking for is,
in just the last few weeks is you need to mandate
that there are auditors and society's companies
with full access to data that can confirm
that what we're saying is true.
And the reason for that is when you allow people
to space to cut corners and you put them in such a high pressure,
high stakes environment, corners get cut.
And you could be a good person under a lot of stress
and you have to make your numbers at the end of the month.
And I think the fact that the CEOs are having these conversations,
we're gonna look back on it into years and say,
why did we not pass laws that mandated at least that as the floor?
Like we shouldn't stop the conversation there.
We should be having conversations about redistribution
and who gets to decide certain kinds of safety trade offs
and various things.
But at a minimum, they wanted observers inside all these companies.
And part of that I think is,
if there were observers inside all the companies,
they would say there's meaningful differences
between what Facebook is doing.
Literally, Mark has been saying things like,
if you think your model's not safe, just don't watch it.
I know.
It's like, I heard it.
It's not simple.
Yeah.
It's like, okay, that's not how it is just this like,
this tendency to dismiss like a hundred years,
200 years of like figuring out that the reason we have regulation
of private companies is not to like,
it's not because we believe that like,
people who work in government or more virtuous
or better or smarter,
but because you just need rules that everyone can follow
in a society and that treat everyone
that every different company equally.
Because otherwise, you have competitive pressures
that lead even people with good intentions to make bad decisions.
And we're in a very similar situation to like,
what is happening between the social media companies right now,
which is, you know, Facebook has really enjoyed
over the years being like, look at all the safety features
we launched for kids.
And when academics went through and started really systematically
in the last, you know, 12 to 18 months,
going through and trying to find those features
or like trigger them,
they found that a lot of them either were just missing
or like didn't work as intended.
Right now, the AI companies are trying to say,
we are being responsible like, look at what we do.
We don't actually know, right?
Like it's the same thing.
We're hearing marketing messages
and we have nothing to confirm them.
And I'm always trying to remind people like,
for most industries,
we're not kept safe by the government.
We're kept safe by competition and innovation, right?
The thing that the government provides
is kind of like the ref who says like, yeah,
like that car actually has fewer fatalities
or like that car has better fuel economy
or when we did crash tests,
the dummy's got less damage.
Like we should be asking what is the crash test dummy of AI, right?
What can the government come in to give kind of like
a common level?
You mentioned sort of independent observers.
Like what else would you need to see
that would give the you confidence
that AI companies were being regulated
or sort of there was sufficient oversight
that wasn't just kind of voluntary agreements
where you have to take their word?
So I think one of the things that is really interesting
watching the behavior of the AI companies
compared to what happened on social media
is we do get substantially more information out
of most of the frontier companies on a regular basis
than we have ever gone out of meta-regarding
meta-zalgarisms, right?
That because there is this larger conversation and concern
and probably the fact there's a lack of immunity,
like I'm guessing part of why they have engaged more
with the public is because they have not gone in section 230, right?
And we have gone substantially more information.
The question is, is that information true?
And it sounds kind of like a half answer
or like kind of a weak answer to say,
like let's just start with observers and full access to data.
But the reality is like I am very, very hesitant
to come in and say like this is what the rules of the road
should be when we don't even really have a good portrait
of what's going on.
Because it is one of these things
where the unintended consequences can be very large.
And I don't want to have a false sense of confidence, right?
Like when you think you're safe
and you're not actually safe,
I was actually like in some ways the worst possible situation.
And so if we could get to a point where we felt confident
that at least the flows of information we are seeing right now
and remember that it's substantially more
than we saw with social media,
if we could just go from being completely distrustable
to being like actually know this has been 85% accurate,
that would at least let us then have materially
different conversations.
Because I think right now people are hesitant to push for more
because we don't actually know what we're even asking for.
You mentioned that your memoir is called The Power of One.
Five years later,
what do you think the power of one person actually is?
I have to say like the thing that I find like most rewarding
or like the thing that I didn't expect,
like when I came forward, I view it as like
it was a selfish action.
Like I felt like my life was over
because I was like in this pit of despair.
I mean like I cannot escape the circumstances that I am in.
Right?
The thing that I would say has been like
the most unexpected reward for it is
I've had so many people come up to me and say like
I am making different choices in my life today.
Like I might have pursued a different career.
I might have quit a job.
I might have done,
I might have gone way more involved in my kids life.
They're school.
The huge spectrum of things
because I saw what you did
and like the information that you brought out.
And I never ever thought that I would touch.
Like I said, we decided to have maybe like a public whistleblower,
like maybe five weeks before the first
Wester General Story came out.
Like I got media trained like three days before I filmed 60 minutes
and 60 minutes got filmed the first week,
the first Wester General Story came out.
Like it was late, late in the game.
I never ever thought in my wildest dreams
that like my story might inspire an AI whistleblower one day.
But like that is part of what the power of one is
that when even one person chooses to live
like a full and authentic life,
it gives other people permission to also go
and live full and authentic lives.
It's so interesting because it does feel like
from your story and the story of other people
inside these companies that it is too much to ask
sort of one person to fix these problems,
to change these problems because there are structural
institutional incentives that need to change
with laws and policies, et cetera.
It seems like maybe the real power that one person has,
as you just mentioned, is like the ability
to get other people to act too.
And that like what we're really looking for here
is collective action.
And we can't just be reliant on the next whistleblower
to save us.
So roll back in time with me to like the 1980s.
So like imagine you're in the Czech Republic,
Soviet Union is like super oppressive.
You are a playwright.
You've been writing plays and you've gone
in trouble because you're a little too snarky.
People have realized these plays about dinner parties
and things like that are actually about communism
and about the Soviet party.
And they're like, you know what?
You don't get to write plays anymore.
You thought you'd kind of dodge the bullet
because you were a mildly aristocratic family
and people are like, oh, he's actually had
like a reasonably high status shop.
You're gonna go work in a brewery for some amount of time.
Like we'll let you out when we're happy with you again.
So Vada Slavhovovl, who later became like the leader
of the free Czech movement.
And was like a big force in toppling the Soviet Union.
He wrote this pamphlet called the power of the powerless.
And he talks about the idea of like when you were living
in a system that truly dehumanizes you,
that the difference between say, you know,
Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union
was the Soviet Union was a system
where if individuals tried to cross the party line,
the party just healed around them.
Right, so you could go and resist,
but like you would just disappear from history.
So like in a system like that,
what remains of like what is the power of the powerless?
And he talks about this idea of like you still have choices
even in systems where you are like very marginalized, right?
And choosing to not harm other people,
choosing to like live fully, you know,
he talks about this idea that people start to notice
that you've like reclaimed a little bit of your own life
and it actually changes how they live.
Yeah.
And so I think there is a real thing
where there are a lot of people in tech right now
that feel powerless.
A lot of people outside tech that feel powerless.
But one of the things I remind people of is
we use a lot of nuclear metaphors
when we talk about the danger of AI.
You know, we're like, we should have a pause.
Cause like back when we were like,
about to blow up the world,
we were like, we should have a test band prize.
You know, if we were gonna go right back
to before we did the test band treaty,
so I think like 1960,
we had so little culture of dissent
that people were beating old women
on the stairs of City Hall in New York
for protesting against civil defense.
Like basically they were like, we should not
large nuclear war.
Like we should not role play nuclear war.
This is a bad idea.
And they literally beat these protesters
until they had broken bones.
Like that's how little culture of dissent we had.
We are so much further along
in terms of being able to realize
that we each have to have a voice
and that we have to stand up
if we see things that are wrong.
And so I'm very hopeful that there is a path forward.
And I hope that someone sees this movie
and it lights up a spark in them
that maybe they can do something too.
There's an irony here.
I've been thinking about, which is like,
you know, your story began with
what social media was doing to society.
One of social media's less obvious effects.
I think is how it's changed our relationship
and our understanding of how,
how political action actually works and happens.
And you know, we increasingly experience politics
because of social media
as an argument about who's right.
And it seems like we've started confusing
sort of winning an argument with changing an outcome.
And you know, you talk about everyone getting a voice.
Like I think social media is incredibly effective
at giving people a voice.
But the question now is like,
what turns a collection of voices into actual power
as opposed to just yelling at each other
and trying to figure out who's right?
I think one of the things that we've come to appreciate
like a lot more, maybe like the last five years
is the value of being in the same places together physically.
Right? So I don't know,
roll back in time to like 2015,
like click, click to vism or like clicking activism,
like, oh, sign this petition, change the world.
Like that, I feel like it was a lot larger part of this
like, guys, in terms of like how people thought
about resistance and people now talk a lot more about
like, what are the things that you can do
to actually advance a problem?
So maybe that means if you have people striking
against automation or being replaced by AI,
like how can you materially help those people who are striking?
Or can you how can you join them in solidarity?
Or maybe it's just like, can you march in a protest?
Right? Like if you don't actually have skin in the game,
it's very hard to actually move the ball down the field.
And I think a secondary thing is just connection, right?
Like part of how we actually harness power
is we help other people to fill less alone
and less powerless.
And I think that's another thing that people have been
waking up to in recent years.
And that's the thing that is different.
Yeah.
Frances Hogan, thank you so much for joining offline.
It was great, great talking to you.
And can't wait to see that movie.
My pleasure.
How good do you? Take care.
You too.
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