Aza: Can I completely blame a company for being 100% committed to their business model and profit, as long as that's not illegal? Aza: As long as there haven't been rules written and they're not breaking the rules, then I can say, I hope your better self knows that there is a better way to affect society. But those guardrails are not in place. And so that is- So what I'm hearing you say is that their behavior, the behavior you saw directly at Facebook, it's egregious, but it's not illegal. That's right. Until we shift, and the role of policy here is to shift the responsibility, the closing the balance
Aza sits down with Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer and a former advisor at the White House. When Yael noticed that Americans were having a harder and harder time finding common ground, she shifted her work from counter-extremism abroad to advising technology companies in the U.S. She believed as danger at home increased, her public sector experience could help fill a gap in Silicon Valley’s talent pool and chip away at the ways tech was contributing to polarization and election hacking. But when she joined Facebook in June 2018, things didn’t go as planned. Yael shares the lessons she learned and her perspective on government’s role in regulating tech, and Aza and Tristan raise questions about our relationships with these companies and the balance of power.