RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
STELTER: “Is that possible, Alex? Will there ever be a solution to this information crisis that has been perpetuated in my view like Facebook as well as Twitter and others?”
STAMOS: “It is really hard because what’s happening is people are able to seek out the information that makes them feel good. That is what’s happening. People have so much choice now. They can choose what their news sources are. They can choose what influencers they want to follow and they can try to seal out anything that helps them question that. I think that gets to a really core issue with how our freedoms as Americans in the way we have treated press freedom in the past is being abused by these actors in that we have given a lot of leeway both in the traditional media and on social media to people to have a very broad range of political views. It is now in the great economic interest of those individuals to become more and more radical. One of the places you can see this is on the fact that you now have competitors to Fox News on their right, which are carried by all the major cable networks who are trying to outflank fox on the right because the moment fox introduced any kind of realism into their reporting, immediately a bunch of people chose to put themselves into a sealed ecosystem. They can do that both on cable. They can do it online. That becomes a huge challenge in figuring out how do you bring people back into the mainstream and try to get us back into the same consensual reality.”
STELTER: “And is that possible?
STAMOS: “It’s hard. I think we got to do a couple things. There needs to be an intentional work by the social media companies collaborating together in the same way they worked on ISIS. When I started on Facebook in 2019, the number one challenge from a content perspective was the abuse of social media by the Islamic state. There was a collaboration between the tech companies and law enforcement to make it impossible for them to use the Internet to recruit and radicalize mostly young Muslim and at the same around the world. Now we’re talking about domestic audience in the United States. The challenge is going to be partially that ISIS did not have a domestic constituency in the United States Congress, but there is over half of the Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the election. And there will be a continual political pressure on the companies to not take it seriously. First you have to focus on the violent extremists. And, second, we have to turn down the influencers to reach these huge audiences. There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than daytime CNN, and they are extremely radical and pushing extremely radical views. And, so, it is up to the Facebooks and YouTubes in particular to think about whether or not they want to be effectively cable networks for disinformation. And then we have to figure out the oann and Newsmax problem that these companies have freedom of speech but I’m not sure we need them to be brought into tens of millions of homes. This is allowing people to seek out information if they want to but not pushing it into their faces is really where we’re going to have to go here.”