美国国家公共电台 NPR As Views Of Tech Turn Negative, Remorse Comes To Silicon Valley

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Facebook says that starting today it will begin sending a message to roughly 87 million people. These are people whose information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica - the political data firm - without any consent. Disclosing this information is part of Facebook's damage control as founder¹ Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify this week before Congress. NPR's Laura Sydell reports there are some feelings of remorse² right now in Silicon³ Valley.

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE⁴: Many of the people who helped build Facebook started out believing in its mission of building community and bringing the world closer together.

SANDY PARAKILAS: I was extremely excited about the power of social media to advance democracy all over the world.

SYDELL: Sandy Parakilas joined Facebook in the summer of 2011 in the midst of the Arab Spring as journalists around the world watched how social media helped the protesters.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The weapons of the activists⁵ of the so-called Arab Spring weren't guns and bombs but the Internet and the mobile phone.

SYDELL: But Parakilas' optimism would be tempered by the reality of Facebook's hunger for raw data about its users.

PARAKILAS: And that is going to push them continuously down a road of deceiving people. It's a surveillance-advertising business model.

SYDELL: Parakilas says he tried to warn his managers at Facebook that they were at risk of putting private information in the wrong hands, but the company was growing fast and making money. Its leaders believed connecting people was inherently good. Parakilas says he left Facebook in 2012 feeling doubts about the company. Now that the problems with its massive data collection system have become public, several early investors⁶ are also expressing regrets. Roger McNamee says he helped mentor⁷ CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

ROGER MCNAMEE: I still feel terrible about it because at the end of the day, these were my friends. I helped them be successful. I wanted them to be successful.

SYDELL: There's plenty of regret these days in Silicon Valley, and more people are coming forward about the negative effect tech is having on society. Guillaume Chaslot says he joined Google-YouTube in 2010. Chaslot came all the way from France. He too started out optimistic.

GUILLAUME CHASLOT: We could only make things better if people were more connected. If everybody could say what he wanted to say, things would naturally get better.

SYDELL: But Chaslot says he noticed the main goal at YouTube wasn't to inform people. It was to keep people watching as long as possible. He spoke⁸ to NPR on Skype.

CHASLOT: This goal has some very bad side effects, and I started to notice the side effect as I worked at YouTube.

SYDELL: Among the side effects that Chaslot noticed was people tended to get one point of view on a topic and not always the right one. For example, search for moon landing on YouTube, and you might get a video like this.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: This particular lecture looks and analyzes⁹ the possibility that man has or has not stepped foot on the moon. This is the NASA-Apollo hoax¹⁰.

SYDELL: Chaslot tried to create an algorithm that would show people different points of view, but he says his bosses weren't interested. A spokesperson from the company says it has updated its algorithm since Chaslot left. According to the company, the goal is not just to try to keep people on the site for as long as possible. The goal now is to measure how satisfied users are. Chaslot left in 2013, but he says from the outside, he watched the site fill up with conspiracy¹¹ theories and divisive content. He warned his former colleagues, but nothing began to change until the presidential election brought more attention to the kinds of videos on the site.

CHASLOT: I should've spoken publicly about these issues. Now, that's what I'm doing, but there was a bit of a delay.

SYDELL: Chaslot says he's still losing sleep over what's going on there. He's even started a site to keep track of YouTube's search algorithms. Of course it may be easier for many techies to speak out now. Investors have done well. Employees were given good salaries for their work. Still, it's probably good news that the very people who helped create the problem are now using their inside knowledge to fix it. Laura Sydell, NPR News.