Health & Science with Dr. Jha and Justin Rosenstein

**Sam Fragoso** (0:06)
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**Sam Fragoso** (1:12)
This is Talk Easy, I'm Sam Fragoso, welcome to the show. See ya.
A little bit of housekeeping at the top. Next week in this country, as I'm sure you know, we'll be holding a national election. In case for some reason you still don't know how and where to vote, be sure to visit www.vote.org. That's www.vote.org. With that in mind, we'll be off this coming Sunday, November 1st, and we'll be returning that following week. Sunday, November 8th, with Professor Noam Chomsky.
But today, I'm pleased to have on Dr. Ashish Jha and Justin Rosenstein. My talk with Dr. Jha will come on the back half of this episode. So, to start, Justin is the co-founder of a company called Asana, a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track and manage their work. But earlier in his career, Justin worked at Google, where he was an instrumental figure in the creation of Google Drive. Once he left Google, he moved to Facebook, where he helped co-create the like button. Can you imagine your life without Google Drive and the like button on Facebook? The fact that we probably can't imagine that is why I'm having Justin on today. He's one of several talking heads in the new film called The Social Dilemma. By now, you've likely seen or heard of it. It's a new documentary on Netflix that features several key players within Silicon Valley, all of whom are sounding the alarm on the dangerous human impact of social networking. Given Justin's expertise in the field, I wanted to sit with him to discuss the dangers of social media, the polarization created by these platforms, and the role these tech companies have in our elections. I also wanted to better understand how we got to this dire moment where more and more of us are addicted to our phones, to our virtual presence. And then, once we understand how we got here, we discussed where we could go as we think about life online and off after November 3rd.
So, without further ado, here is Justin Rosenstein. See next time.
Justin Rosenstein, thank you very much for being here. As people are listening to this conversation, we are less than five days out from the election, and that's where I want to start this talk. How do you think these social media companies have handled the 2020 election versus the 2016 election?

**Justin Rosenstein** (4:14)
Certainly a lot of measures have been taken, and I don't track every single measure. Some of the things have, it seems, succeeded in curbing some of the more egregious problems. And I want to give credit where credit's due, to the extent the companies have invested in that. I'm thrilled to see them taking seriously the responsibility that they have, essentially as the public square.
This is the place in which democracy is increasingly happening, is on these social media platforms. And in order for us to consider the results of our democracy legitimate, we have to feel like that public square where the discourse is happening is a place that is capable of handling the civic conversations that we need and not leading to disastrous runaway effects. But the extent to which the fundamental structure of social media has remained completely unchanged over the last four years is concerning, to say the least. The business model of social media companies, the way that they maximize profit, and also the internal metrics they use, which sometimes aren't as simple as maximizing money or as simple as maximizing the number of minutes spent staring at your screen, but they're all basically just engagement metrics. They're all essentially that companies consider themselves more successful and they profit more roughly the more time you spend staring at a screen.
And then they have designers who are interested to try to maximize to those metrics.
And they have artificial intelligences, these literally super computer intelligences that have been tasked with, okay, given all this data and all these patterns, what can you do in terms of what videos you recommend on YouTube or what posts you recommend on Facebook to maximize for these engagement metrics? And if you do that, you don't need mal intent. You don't need anyone cackling, being like, ha, we're going to destroy democracy, we're going to polarize people, we're going to addict people, and decrease their ability to make sense of reality. The emergent phenomenon of the rules of that game, of any system that is incentivized and optimized to maximize for those metrics, is going to have the emergent phenomenon of increasing polarization, because it turns out that things that are outrageous make us spend more time looking at our screens. Information that confirms our existing biases, or that makes us feel like we're learning the truth but isn't necessarily grounded in reality. Think like sensationalist conspiracy theories. These things are much more likely to spread in that environment. And it shows up in the data. Like there was studies done that fake news spreads six times faster than real news on Twitter.