Kara Swisher on Tech Giants, Conspiracies and Facebook

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Well, of course, in the United States, many, many of the various and sometimes nefarious forces at play in the upcoming election and beyond are under the microscope. Kara Swisher is a fearless and highly respected business technology reporter working tirelessly to shed light on the inner workings of big tech. Swisher brings her expertise to the podcast world as the co-host of “Pivot” for Vox and the host of “Sway” for New York Times Opinion. In a Zoom call from Washington, D.C., Swisher talked to our Walter Isaacson about tech giants and how Facebook is now trying to step up and stamp out the spread of conspiracy theories.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Kara Swisher, welcome to the show.

KARA SWISHER, HOST, “PIVOT”: Thanks a lot, Walter. How you doing?

ISAACSON: Pretty good. Pretty good. Your new amazing podcast, “Sway,” you have just done a two-part series on election security and whether Facebook is making those systemic changes.

SWISHER: Yes.

ISAACSON: Are they?

SWISHER: Well, it was interesting. I interviewed Alex Stamos, who is from Facebook, who was the chief information security officer there for many years, and ran into a little trouble because he wanted more transparency. And so he now has a new thing at Stanford called the Stanford Internet Observatory, where they’re looking at these issues, really, with a bunch of graduate students, a whole bunch of data specialists, and trying to figure out from an election — from a technology point of view, what can be done. And then I talked to TREVOR POTTER, who’s a well known Republican lawyer, who has been working with a nonprofit group he started that he — that — trying to do cases all across the country. And so we talked about the various cases that he has been involved in.

ISAACSON: Yes, but Facebook keeps doing things, it seems to me, like whack-a-troll, where they’re saying, OK, we’re going to stop this, we’re going to stop that.

SWISHER: Yes.

ISAACSON: Isn’t there some systemic problem that should be taken on?

SWISHER: Well, I think the difficulty is that they had never envisioned they had this kind of role. And they’re not editorial by nature, as you know. I mean, you have dealt with them for many years. And so they don’t think of themselves as editorial, when, in fact, they have become one of the largest publishers on the planet. And the word they sometimes use is a weird one called platisher. Have you – – you have heard that. It’s a publisher and a platform, and you really can’t be both. So, what they what they have done is just suddenly started to take responsibility in kind of a nonsystemic way. And I think that’s why they got in trouble last week over “The New York Post” article, which has now been called into question by a lot of people, but, nonetheless, probably shouldn’t have been handled the way it was by both Facebook and Twitter.

ISAACSON: Tell me what — “The New York Post” article, why it was handled badly?

SWISHER: Well, it’s this article of dubious sourcing with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. Couldn’t have two more dubious sources, I think, on any story, but, nonetheless, they wrote this story about Hunter Biden, which is an issue that the Trump campaign is trying to push rather hard. Now, it’s been disproved by lots and lots of reputable news organizations. The story is suspect. And so they put up this story about this hard drive, and it had a really wacky story about how it got to the — anyway, I’m not going to go into the details of it, because I found it hard to believe myself. And so did some “New York Post” people. In any case, they put it up. And what they did is, they put some personal information in the stuff they put up. And so that’s a big ding at Twitter, for sure. And I think Facebook might have taken it down for the same reason. And then there was also — they had a policy that was very unclear on hacked materials, which I think is problematic, because a lot of big newspapers use materials that they get, such as Trump’s tax returns. And so conservatives seized on it, and the Trump campaign seized on it, that it was being censored and this and that, when they were trying to sort of be very strict in following their very confusing rules that they had — have had in place. So the whole thing blew up. And it was used — it took sort of a pretty shoddy story, and then made it into this cause celebre for the right wing about censorship, which has been one of their things they talk about without a whole lot of proof. And here, to them, was proof, even though it kind of wasn’t, but it looked bad, for sure.

ISAACSON: What about taking QAnon? Is that the right thing to do?

SWISHER: Well, it’s an interesting question. And Alex talked about that a lot, because, unlike white supremacists, who always tend towards saying racist or violent things, which is sort of a commonality for them, according to Alex, or ISIS, which is about violence and — so it’s different things, those are very easy for Facebook to remove or for Twitter to remove. It was Facebook in this case. It’s really difficult when it comes to QAnon, because it’s a very nebulous, menacing group of people, but, nonetheless, not particularly violent necessarily. It could lead to violence. It’s very — it’s a nebulous situation, and they can shade different things they’re doing, such as something the president mentioned, which is to pretend what they’re really about is trying to combat pedophilia. That is not what this group is about. It’s just one of the many crazy conspiracy theories that they have — that they sort of traffic in. And so the question is, how do you link it to violence or the current rules that Facebook has? The same thing happened with Holocaust deniers. As you know, two years ago, I did an interview, a very famous interview, with Mark Zuckerberg, where he said that Holocaust deniers don’t mean to lie, and, therefore, would not take them off, which was sort of a lie in itself. Nonetheless, he didn’t take them down, and then, suddenly, they changed their mind on it, because they saw rising levels of anti-Semitic violence. So, it’s just a — it’s a — I think the lack of systemic rules that are transparent and where everybody could see what they’re doing in a much more cogent way is the problem. And that’s been a problem for years.

ISAACSON: Facebook’s a private company. Why would anybody try to force them, why should the government try to force him to do anything?

SWISHER: They shouldn’t. They aren’t. The government hasn’t been forcing them. They are making threats now. What what’s interesting is that now the conservatives are making all kinds of threats of subpoenas, and we’re going to do and going to do that to Section 230, which is a law that gives these platforms broad immunity. It’s very complex. It’s not just that, but it’s a complex law that was passed decades ago. And I think they just say it, and they pull it out, but they never do anything about it. And same thing with the Democrats. They say it and they never do anything about it. And so the question is, what do — how do we want to regulate tech? And how different is each tech company from each other? And I think that’s one of the big issues is that they’re not — Apple is not, Facebook is not, Microsoft is not Google. And so each of them requires a different discussion. And then there are some overall ones that we have to do together for all of them, like privacy bills. A national privacy bill would impact the ones at least that have advertising businesses, and all of them really.

ISAACSON: You mentioned Section 230, which gives a pretty qualified immunity to any of these platforms like Facebook, so they can’t be sued for what gets put on them. There is going to be a strong push to pull back Section 230.

SWISHER: Yes.

ISAACSON: Shouldn’t Facebook be responsible for what gets amplified on it?

SWISHER: It’s very — it’s a very complex issue. In some parts, yes. In some parts, no. And that’s why it needs legislators who are actually cooperating and talking with industry and talking with citizens and talking with citizens groups, talking to the people affected, to understand what’s the best way to move forward — I think it’s 30 years’ old this last; 30 years hence, things have changed. These are the richest and most powerful companies on the planet owned by the richest and most powerful people on the planet. They used to be start- ups in garages, literally garages. And so what do you do when you were to help an industry, and now it’s — they’re monsters? They’re monster large, or however you want to describe them. And so we have to sit down and have a cogent discussion, instead of eliminating it, or it’ll have massive repercussions on small companies, if they just eliminate it, and probably ensconce the large companies in place, because they have got lawyers coming out their eyeballs. Like, they have got so many lawyers. And so that’s — it’s a complex issue, which requires complex legislation, which is not something that’s happening in Washington right now, I think.

ISAACSON: You saw that congressional hearing on antitrust, which turned also into anti-Section 230. It seemed more like a clown show than serious legislating.

SWISHER: Well, actually, that was — that’s actually a year-long investigation, which was cooperative until recently, until it got — we moved into this election season. And that was a really interesting, actually — which one? The one you’re talking about with Mark Zuckerberg last year was a clown show. The one recently was actually pretty interesting, without them there, when they were talking about — some of them — they had various people come and testify, including some of the heads of these companies. Actually, the report was really interesting. It was — it definitely surfaced a lot of e-mails that were problematic for some of these companies. It definitely had Jeff Bezos admitting that maybe some of the information leaked from one side of the marketplace over to the platform. There were all kinds of interesting avenues for each of these companies to explore. And so that’s the beginning of it, an investigation of their behavior. Same thing is happening over at the Justice Department, although, again, tainted by politics, because Bill Barr wants to move forward quicker with the Google investigation. Some of the lawyers do not. Facebook is nowhere to be seen in any of these investigations, because it’s close to the administration. And so all of this has been so hopelessly politicized in every angle. And I’m not naive. I understand politics, but, at the same time, there needs to be, as there are for other industries that we value in this country, cogent legislation. We will see if that will happen sometime. I don’t know. I have no idea if that will happen.

ISAACSON: It seems that the problem is not so much that Facebook and other social media publish certain things, but that they amplify things and, that they have a systemic bias towards enraging people and engaging people. And that has led us to where we are today. Is that something that can be fixed?

SWISHER: I’m not sure. I actually think the architecture is problematic. And Alex Stamos and I talked about this quite a bit, this idea of how it’s done and how things move in — within the system. And so, no, actually, the way it’s architected, it’s for virality and speed and not context. But it’s — I think it’s probably virality, speed and an engagement, essentially. And then when it’s engagement, it’s engagement. So that’s — it just leads to it. If they architected it for speed and context and accuracy, that would be Google. The search engine actually does that pretty well. You don’t ever get on Google, the search engine, and get angry about QAnon or be pulled into QAnon. But it does over on YouTube, which is also owned by Google. They have those problems. And they also recently started to ban QAnon on that platform, too. So it just depends on the platform.

ISAACSON: You say that these companies say that they’re neither a pure platform, like, say the phone company is, or a pure publisher, like “The New York Times,” that can decide and then re-decide whether or not it should do a Tom Cotton op-ed piece.

SWISHER: Yes.

ISAACSON: But that seems in some ways true. Neither category fits for them. Should we try to create another category?

SWISHER: Perhaps. Maybe there is. It’s just — the issue is they benefit from the confusion, and their business benefits from it. And so they don’t have any of the costs that regular media have to be very careful. Every media, when they screw up, as both you and I know, pay a high price when that happens. Even though libel is difficult to prove in this country, these companies get into a lot of trouble. And so they’re they understand there are laws there designed to protect people. In this case, nobody’s protected but these giant companies. And so the question is what — they have been trying to do this themselves. And that’s another difficult thing, because Facebook, as you know, is controlled by one person, who keeps saying, interestingly — and I find this the most interesting — that he doesn’t want to be an arbiter of truth. But he built a platform that requires an arbiter of truth. And, therefore, what do we do? Do we want Mark Zuckerberg being our arbiter of truth? He doesn’t want to do it. I don’t want him to do it. Who should do it? And that’s really the problem. It’s architected in such a way that it’s impossible for him to do a good job. And it’s — he’s not capable of doing a good job. And the job is almost impossible.

ISAACSON: Well, one safeguard we have when a company starts, say, centering things we don’t like or incenting or amplifying things we don’t like is, we can move to another company. But a company like Facebook is so dominant, it really takes up all the oxygen of that ecosystem. Your partner Scott Galloway on your wonderful “Pivot” podcast has been pushing for things like Facebook, I think, to be broken up or more antitrust. How do you feel about that?

SWISHER: Well, I think that Scott has talked about that. We both have talked about it. I think the issue is, each company is different. They’re their own delicate flower, right? So we have to deal with them in a different way. And so — none of them are delicate, by the way. But a Google solution about search is a very — which controls — which has a dominant search position, is very different than a social media question. It’s very different than Apple and the App Store, which is, as you have seen, they have gotten into big fights with the App Store developers. And then you have an Amazon, with its marketplace and its platform. And so each of them requires, whether it’s antitrust action — in some cases, that might be the right thing. Whether it’s suggesting they spin things off. That’s another answer. Fees that they pay, for example, or fines is another answer. Another answer is regulation. Another answer is legislation that is really — that is really fresh and new vs. just regulation that we then suddenly enforce. And so that’s the problem is that this is a very — there’s no such thing as big tech. There is a lot of big tech companies. And each in their own way have contributed to problems that we have had in our society. And just like the car companies, which are much easier to regulate, because they do the same exact thing, or the airline companies, same thing, we have to figure out a way through to deal with them, because one rule is certainly not going to work for all of them.

ISAACSON: You have interviewed both Nancy Pelosi and then the people who run Facebook, and your podcast is about power. Who has more power these days, the people run the tech companies or the people run Congress?

SWISHER: The people who run tech companies, but the only people that can stop those companies or to pull them in is government. As Scott has talked a lot about on “Pivot,” the only people with the power to deal with these companies is the government. And our government, compared to governments across the world, they have tried different things, but the fact of the matter is, the U.S. government has never tried to rein in these tech companies. And that is the only countervailing force to the power that these companies have, as it has been throughout history, whether it’s trains, or planes, or automobiles, or AT&Ts and IBMs or Microsofts. And you were around for that. So that’s the only force, is the federal government, to deal with these companies, and hopefully in a way that will not quash innovation and not quash what has been one of our greatest industries of the past 30 years, essentially.

ISAACSON: But government regulation in a serious way will require some bipartisanship and nonpartisanship. And it used to be that way, even from the Microsoft, even from the Sherman Antitrust days.

SWISHER: Yes.

ISAACSON: But now, suddenly, it seems in the past year, it’s become wackily partisan. Is that simply because of the election?

SWISHER: No, I don’t think so. I think there’s some — I think conservatives — I have had a lot of these discussions, I’m trying to get a couple of them to come on the show to talk about it. But they tend to think there’s conservative bias against conservatives on these platforms, when I make the point is, they’re the highest-ranking things on Facebook. If you look at Facebook’s own list of the most popular posts, they are almost all conservative, which is really interesting. They can podcast. They can get on Twitter. They can mouth anything they want anywhere. And they still persist in the idea that their thoughts are being quashed. And so that hearing on the Hill was really interesting, because the Democrats were, I have to say, correctly focused on power, which is I think this is what it’s all about, which is what the “Sway” podcast is about. It was about the power of these companies and the power to rein them in, and the conservatives were quite focused on conservative bias. And, again, President Trump is using it as a cudgel in this election. It’s not working particularly well, but he uses it. And at the very same time, Twitter is the savior of him, that he’s allowed to — he’s allowed to say whatever he wants, until recently, when Twitter decided perhaps he shouldn’t be able to break the rules quite as extravagantly as he does. And then, of course, he started to squeal. And so here we are. Here we are. He finally has to live the rules the rest of us live, and he’s angry about it and considers that bias, when, in fact, it’s just, you’re not telling the truth, such as about COVID, which is incredibly important to tell the truth about. And we’re going to — we’re going to either cover you up or point people to correct information or remove you altogether. And so that sets in. Then it becomes political, and then it’s hopeless.

ISAACSON: Kara Swisher, it’s always a delight talking to you.

SWISHER: Thank you.