“If you get told, hey, you have a bias in your algorithm and you choose not to fix it, at some point it becomes a knowing choice. So I don't think they ever set out to intentionally make things worse. But when they were told they had options to make things better, they chose not to take them.”

It was an incredibly scary period of time. Less because I thought something was going to happen to me. Just for context, until Sarah Wynn Williams was sued by Facebook, Facebook had never gone after another Facebook whistleblower. It's not like I feared legal repercussions, but every day I was dealing with subjects inside of Facebook where people's lives were on the line. And it was very clear to me at the time that if I got caught before I was done, no one else was going to get to finish. Because it was very clear that Facebook would close all the doors as soon as they knew that they had that vulnerability. And after I came forward, they did shut down lots and lots of their internal access to information. So it wasn't like an unfounded fear. But every single day was just like this looming anxiety of like, is today the day that I get caught?

I think a lot of the things that you've leaked and discussed come down to kind of one fundamental question. Do you think that meta pushes content knowingly and intentionally that makes people angry that harms society for profit?

One of the things that I've found speaking to insiders from within all of the major social media companies since you decided to become a whistleblower is how much they highlight what you've discussed there, that kind of engagement arms race, essentially, between the companies. There's one insider I spoke to who was someone who used to run Crowd Tangle, who worked at Facebook, Brandon Silverman, who you probably know. And he said something to me in a recent investigation I did that there was this calcifying of defensiveness within Meta more broadly, Facebook and Instagram, about the way that they could be inflaming the problem rather than fixing it. How do you feel the situation has evolved, changed, or not since you came out and spoke about this?

So there's a movie coming out called The Social Reckoning, which is like a dramatization of a lot of my experiences around whistleblowing, but it's as much about Mark Zuckerberg and like what is his experience of leading the company. And one of the things that I felt like rang really true is, you know, I think most people are not aware of how much inside of Facebook, all decisions flow back to Mark. That because he has the majority of voting shares, like in terms of being a shareholder, he has the majority of the votes, his opinion is the only one that matters. And I think one of the things that has really gotten worse since I came forward is I think Mark had a sense of, you know, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't as of like maybe 2020, you know, around the 2020 election. I would say even today, it's even more so where, you know, it is not clear to me that he has integrated the feedback that he's received from me, from others over the last five years. And especially as we see them begin to dabble in AI and these like augmented reality glasses, it doesn't seem any of the old lessons have been learned. And so unless we change the circumstances and the incentives around these companies, we're going to continue to see the same kinds of bad behavior.

Thank you for bringing up the social reckoning. We are going to ask about that film more in a moment. But just on Mark Zuckerberg, you've recently said that he is not evil. You know, he is someone who's apologized on a number of occasions. Can you just give us a little bit of an insight into him as a character? Like, what do you think is going on inside his head? How morally culpable do you think he feels about all of this?