Privacy Highlight: Keynote with Frances Haugen & Leslie Katz

I'm going to introduce the next speakers we have a keynote fireside chat with Leslie Katz and Francis Haugen so they will be talking about social media about the rise of new social media platforms and the implications of governments Francis is an advocate for social media transparency and accountability come on feel free to grab seats grab mics and Leslie is a former elected official working with a lot of crypto companies to navigate the Regulatory and government Affairs Arena I'm really looking forward to learning from both of you so thanks and take it away well thank you before we start I guess or as we start I'd just like to say when it comes to taking a stand talk about taking a stand so we can just give a shout out for Francis for taking such an amazing stand um I'm assuming everyone really knows what she did but as an attorney I really appreciate what it takes to do what she did which is coming forward in an environment that's really not that hospitable to people coming forward so thank you for your courage and for what you did it's really making so many positive changes is this on and thank you I I've learned over time that not everyone is aware um just for context I brought forward 22 000 pages of documents from Facebook in the fall of 2021 and since then I've been working with organizations around the world with governments around the world around understanding how can we push for transparency and accountability for social media platforms thank you so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see the evolution that's taking place in the decentralized social media platforms so people often ask me like how do we solve the problem of social media and for we've talked to different people and they'll identify different things that they would articulate as the problem you know some people might talk about censorship people might talk about impacts on kids might people might impact on on much more broad things like terrorism or human trafficking uh in my mind the problem of social media really comes down to incentives and to control right now all of these platforms are advertising supported that means they make their money by keeping you on there as long as possible and they are often owned by single people they're controlled by single people so I always get a little annoyed when people get peeved about Elon Musk and how Elon Musk is the the only person who controls Twitter because Mark Zuckerberg has been the only person controlling Facebook for like 20 years right this is not just like an Elon thing um web 3 social media I think is a huge opportunity because it's about ways of giving people control like if if there had been a Dao governing Facebook it would have never turned into what it did uh it's about incentives things like imagine if creators control these platforms like right now you have people who make their livelihoods on these platforms and they have no ability to influence the rules that govern them or how their conscience distributed and so I think there's a huge amount of opportunity in the web three space for addressing some of the core things that I think really LED social media Australia you talk maybe a little bit about where you see the role of privacy now in web3 so almost certainly we're going to see a rise of end-to-end encrypted social media because like one of the major differentiating factors of a lot of these decentralized social media platforms is privacy um I think it's going to be really interesting because uh in the new evolving regulatory environment unless we proactively design for safety privacy and safety are going to come into conflict there's not an unnecessary like a required conflict but we have to think about these things proactively to that point I had to write it down because it was such a ridiculous name but it's uh in this current iteration of Congress most of the social media bills that have been introduced so far relate to children and this is when the bill to permit parents to bring civil action against social media companies that failed to provide parental access and data control rights regarding social media accounts of minors but it highlights really I think where the regulatory Arena and the policy makers are looking and I think it's a message for all of us it's going to be incumbent on all of us to figure out how do we address these concerns without curtailing the growth of the companies I wonder if you could talk a little bit where you see that going well I think there's a difference between privacy for adults and uh making sure that parents are able to have a role in their children's lives one of the recurrent patterns that we've seen is there's been an eskling growth in the suicide rate for children um you look at the graphs and they're very clearly hockey sticking in the last say seven years and there are huge correlations with social media usage and so in the case of a lot of the the ones around giving parents rights to be involved it's that in a huge fraction of those cases where social media played a role parents only find out after their kids died that the algorithms were pushing their kids towards feeds that were just back to back you know very depressing content glorifying suicide or self-harm those kinds of things but for adults like we shouldn't um usually the conflicts that I see where I really chafe where people say privacy is in conflict with security is around things like predation right so we are in a world now where like grooming narratives and child predators are like even more prevalent than when I was a kid in the 90s when the internet was really dangerous um and in that case there are ways of Designing social media where we put more control in the hands of kids you know we can have things where uh on the client side we can begin giving more tools to kids so they're they can be aware this person is contacting a lot of kids or this person is not acting in a way that is aligned with being a child just so you're aware and so I'm always big about how do we put autonomy and control back in the hands of users and we have to proactively design that way if we want these systems to still be safe once they go end and encrypted and that kind of leads into my next question what are some of the things that we need to be considering with respect to the building of end-to-end encryption and social media and I think there are questions around um scale so once we get into questions around algorithms uh we need to keep in mind that the way regulation is changing if we want social media the transition to decentralized social media to be successful we have to take into mind what is the current regular regulatory environment internationally so uh the European Union has passed a law called the Digital Services act and it says that if you touch more than 10 percent of the users in the European Union you are now required to comply with a long list of transparency objectives and um I think one of the things that we're going to have to trade off is either accept the decentralized platforms can only grow to a certain size because otherwise they'll get have to comply with these systems or to think proactively about what are ways that we can allow people to opt in to contributing to transparency so for example uh right now there are people who volunteer to provide for example the ads they receive to observatories that are monitoring biases and how Facebook distributes ads Facebook responded to that when that happened by suing the researchers because they showed that Facebook was was basically lying about a variety of their policies um but you can imagine beginning to think about what are ways that we can still have ways of holding a platform accountable being able to research a platform but where we put the control in the hands of users and so having saying things like hey would you like to opt in to be able to provide data you can meaningfully in a way allow us to study these platforms you don't have to do it from a central Observatory perspective I think you sort of touched on it but are there are there some other things that you can think of that would help make the platform safer um I think there's questions around like how do you give tools for example to kids right so right now a lot of social media platforms don't want to acknowledge danger so it's a lot like what the automotive industry was like in the 1960s like in the 1960s prior to Ralph Nader writing unsafe at any speed the automotive industry knew a lot of ways to make cars safer things like seat belts you know no car in the United States had default seat belts in 1999 in 1965 but they didn't want to talk about safety because then people would be like wait no one else is talking about safety are your cars more dangerous than everyone else's similarly today you can imagine a world where you gave more avenues for kids to build a flag people who were behaving inappropriately to them you know you can imagine ways in which kids could support each other but if you begin to build those tools where like a for example compulsive use imagine building into your platform tools that give control to users about compulsive use things like instead of just popping up a reminder at 10 and saying like you know it's awfully late do you want to go to bed you know we've known for years that if you've slowed down an interface people use it less you know you if an app that actually wanted to address compulsive use for kids would do things like say hey when do you want to stop using the app tonight for two hours before that bedtime the app could slow down a little and slow down a little slow down a little and around your bedtime you'd want to go to bed but if you build that feature you're admitting your platform might be dangerous and so there are things like this where you can design to put a control back in the hands of users and I think in a world where the users and the creators own the platform they have an incentive to care for each other in their community in a way that is different than just having a centralized Corporation say you know our our best uh we're just trying to maximize for growth well I think in a world where we're letting people take back ownership of their data it's huge um and figuring out ways to do that um I know it's one thing with adults it's certainly you know different with children but you know when we look at what we're doing and in terms of the privacy and the letting people onto platforms you know you have entities like signal or mobile coin that have incredible privacy built into the tools but also ways of making sure that you don't let Bad actors in so you know that's sort of this dance that has to be done and it can be done like like I always say there's there's nothing intrinsically dangerous about encryption it's about the combination of what features go along with encryption you know on on Facebook Messenger there is a directory of children attached to that messaging platform on Signal the only way you get to contact your child is if you know the child's phone number right like they're different kinds of worlds kind of led into my next question are there things in your your past some of your prior experiences including potentially at meta or Facebook that you can draw parallels to and then if so how do we not recreate some of those same problems well I think it's a thing like um so the difference between a social media platform that is subscription based or like where the uh users are the owners of the platform and one that's Advertising based and when I worked on on Pinterest um I launched a feature that increased Global consumption by six percent so there was a bias in the algorithm that pushed the feed towards homogeneity you know basically show you the same kind of things over and over again because AI is not intelligent it doesn't understand boredom um so overnight six percent more pins were being viewed globally so when people talk about compulsive use or like Mindless growing I am partially to blame um but we only increased advertising Revenue by two and a half percent and the reason for that is when you extend sessions the most money the platform makes from you is right at the beginning so you get a thousand pins in they're making less money from you than if you were in the first hundred pens you could imagine a world where the platform said okay what's the incremental cost to you from consuming more versus the incremental gain you get from consuming more you know at some point it's in it's it it's in the global best interest to help you turn off your app for Netflix they have an active incentive to get you off because they're paying for debt your data right they're paying for you to stream and so if you just sit there for too long just mindlessly watching they'll pop up a thing saying are you still there that's a subscription service they're not going to get more money from you for keeping you on and making you stay up until two I in the case of uh I think in a world where you had a user-owned platforms create your own platforms there's more of an incentive to say hey like you're really really you've been on here for hours today we don't think that's actually like we should make sure you're making conscious choices you know you're not doing regretted use um because otherwise we'd be using you as a means to an end like like in the case of an advertising platform the longer they keep you there the more money they make off you um it's kind of a Netflix I think the next thing is going to be coming up which is tying in a little bit to privacy is trying to figure out who's on the platform and who's using you know the the the the the account lockdown thing password sharing password sharing yeah it'll be interesting um so sort of switching a little bit and touching I guess on on what some of the prior speakers have said and I think it's probably going to be a recurring theme here but I would be remiss if I didn't say and I'm going to repeat a phrase I think others have said it perhaps at this conference but if you don't have a seat at the table you're on the menu and it really highlights how important it is that we all show up and uh educate policy makers and regulators and you know I'm trying to look at sort of the silver lining of the whole FTX debacle and the beauty of that is it's made regulators and policy makers a little bit more aware of the industry I mean much of my job I joke is serving as a translator between people in the technology Industries and people in the policy and Regulatory worlds and I remember the first case that I was involved in which the SEC came in and we're helping my client kind of navigate through that their questions were so basic it's shocking it was mine numbing and we felt like we were having to give them a crash course in blockchain and we saw the iteration get a little bit better but you know when you talk to legislators there's very few at the Congressional or the Senate level that really have a good grasp of what we're doing they have to know so many different areas I'm I've been so I I like to joke sometimes that the the crypto industry should sponsor me because I end up in all these conversations with politicians or like legislative aides and and it's it's so weird I am not a crypto expert like I'm I'm in the Halo of the community a lot of friends there uh but because I'm a technologist and they don't necessarily sit down with that many they always ask me crypto questions for like the last like five minutes they're like actually we have a couple of questions about crypto and and it's it's just amazing like they have it's even people who I would consider some of the more informed technology related politicians still ask incredibly basic questions and so I guess a plea to all of you is take the opportunity to meet with your local you know it starts people bubble all the way up meet with your local electives meet with your members of Congress it's really important that they hear from people in the crypto field to get educated because it is I'm constantly amazed at the lack of deep understanding that's there and I think if that were the case we would see a lot better pieces of legislation coming out that would recognize the tools and the opportunity presented by crypto so instead we've just seen we're just seeing a lot of enforcement action and it's in part because that's the prism that they're looking at things from they're seeing Bad actors because that's you know the sexy news stories and they're not seeing all of the opportunities like what we're going to see in you know social media Platforms in web3 it's really an opportunity to correct some of the problems we've seen elsewhere but most of the folks making the policy decisions don't fully understand that so there's a few members there and Senators Loomis and gillibrand have a piece of legislation and I loved Senator I think with Senator Loomis might have been Gila brown one of them said after FTX they said well the good news about it is we now see where we don't want to make mistakes in our legislation and have unintended consequences but it shouldn't take something like FTX to Bubble Up When we have so many knowledgeable people here that they would love to hear from and I've had multiple electeds both you know Statewide constitutional officers and others that have said can you bring me a group of experts that can help me understand what this is so I do the right thing and I think there's going to be more and more opportunities for that so please take advantage and I would particularly encourage if you are working on any project that has utility tokens that is has a focus on governance those kinds of things those messages are not getting out like they idea that you can use crypto for things other than stores of value is just it's like nowhere and so please please please make the time and spread the message and yeah and interestingly I was speaking with somebody who you'll probably hear from a little bit later but they made the point that if we get good regulation then law enforcement can focus on that small portion of Bad actors and not be scatter shot and I think that's a message it needs to go to Regulators as well that doing it the right way is going to free up the proper approach and allow the industry to expand and grow in ways that I think everyone will benefit from so okay so thank you very much we've got 33 seconds but and on time but Francis thank you for everything you do and for being the Ambassador for the crypto industry when you're up on the hills and a little bit helps thanks everyone