The Facebook Dilemma: Part One
4:01
"When Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, I think, he was really fascinated by hacker culture, this notion that software programmers could, using their wits, do things that would shock the world"
Roger McNamee
5:17
"it wasn't that they intended to do harm so much as they were, at least in the design of the product, unconcerned about the possibility that harm would result."
Roger McNamee
6:33
"Well, the one thing that Mark Zuckerberg has been so good at is being incredibly clear and compelling about the mission that Facebook has always had"
Mike Hoefflinger
7:11
"How could you not? How exciting!"
Elizabeth Linder
7:33
"I think the short answer is completely yes and I think that's why we loved it. It became clear to us especially in a moment like when we crossed a billion monthly active users for the first time."
Mike Hoefflinger
8:30
"I was a big believer in the company. I knew that it was going to be a paradigm-shifting thing"
Antonio García Martínez
9:09
"there's a, you know, almost a mafioso code of silence that you're not supposed to talk about the business in any but the most flattering way. Right?"
Antonio García Martínez
10:11
"the story of Growth has really been about making Facebook available to people that wanted it but couldn’t have access to it"
Naomi Gleit
10:53
"So I think Mark—and Mark has said this, that we have been slow to really understand the ways in which Facebook might be used for bad things. We’ve been really focused on the good things."
Naomi Gleit
11:11
"The growth team had tons of engineers and people were constantly figuring out how you could make the new user experience more engaging, how you could figure out how to get more people to sign up"
Sandy Parakilas
12:34
"At the time, we were a little bit skeptical about the Like button."
Soleio Cuervo
12:55
"it was incredibly important because it allowed us to understand who are the people you care more about that cause you to react and who are the businesses, the pages, the other interests on Facebook that are important to you. And that gave us a degree of constantly-increasing understanding about people"
Mike Hoefflinger
13:35
"So Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the provision which allows the internet economy to grow and thrive, and Facebook is one of the principal beneficiaries of this provision."
Tim Sparapani
15:10
"No. We relied on the public's common sense and common decency to police the site."
Tim Sparapani
16:18
"And it just created, for me, a moment of “Maybe we can do this."
Wael Ghonim
17:31
"the technology was for me the enabler."
Wael Ghonim
18:22
"they were relatively restrained externally about taking credit for it, but internally they were, I would say, very happy to take credit for the positive aspect of the Arab Spring and the idea that social media is being used to effect democratic change."
Sandy Parakilas
18:37
"activists and civil society leaders that were very much part of it, most of them would just come up to me and say, you know, “Wow, Facebook, you know, this was huge. We couldn't have done this without you guys.”"
Elizabeth Linder
20:04
"So if I call my opponents names, my tribe is happy and celebrating. Yes, do it; like, comment, share."
Wael Ghonim
20:44
"there was a page… It had like, hundreds of thousands of followers. All that it did was creating fake statements on behalf of politicians and public figures, and I was a victim of that page"
Wael Ghonim
21:20
"I tried to talk to people who are in Silicon Valley, because I was connected to a large group of people, but I feel like it was not being heard."
Wael Ghonim
21:58
"activists in my region were on the front lines of, you know, spotting corners of Facebook that the rest of the world, the rest of the company wasn't yet talking about, because again, in a company that's built off numbers and metrics and measurements, anecdotes sometimes got lost along the way. And that was always a real challenge and always bothered me."
Elizabeth Linder
23:37
"these companies were terribly understaffed, in over their heads in terms of the important role they were playing."
Zeynep Tufekci
25:41
"pressure heading into the IPO, of course, was to prove that Facebook was a great business. Otherwise, we'd have no shareholders."
Mike Hoefflinger
26:23
"The business model we see today was created by Sheryl Sandberg and the team she built at Facebook, many of whom had been with her at Google"
Roger McNamee
27:10
"there was a meeting – I think it was in March of 2012 – in which it was everyone who built stuff inside Ads. So it was a roomful of maybe 12 to 15 people, myself among them."
Antonio García Martínez
28:09
"So there's this extraordinary thing that happens that doesn't get much attention at the time. About four or five months before the IPO—I've just left the company—and the company announces its first relationship with data broker companies."
Tim Sparapani
29:12
"they made a product that was a better tool for advertisers than anything that had ever come before it."
Roger McNamee
30:28
"In my personal file, I think the most relevant information or the most sensitive information was usually my messages"
Max Schrems
33:31
"when we started to ask questions, he became increasingly uncomfortable."
Kara Swisher
35:19
"Well, I, I, you know, I don't know if he thought about that. It's kind of interesting, because they're very loose on it."
Kara Swisher
38:25
"And they went around the room and they said, “Well, who's in charge?""
Sandy Parakilas
40:28
"I think there is a certain arrogance there that led to a lot of bad long-term decision-making."
Sandy Parakilas
49:25
"Yes. And there were disinformation campaigns from a number of different countries on Facebook. You know, disinformation campaigns were a regular facet of Facebookery abroad."
Elizabeth Linder
We filmed four dozen original interviews while making The Facebook Dilemma. Our reporting team conducted in-depth interviews with current and former Facebook executives, internet activists, government and intelligence officials in the United States and around the world, the digital chief of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and leading journalists and scholars.
Explore many of these interviews — and see how we used them in the film — in this interactive version of The Facebook Dilemma, part of FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project.
Interviews
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