We know that what we're doing matters to a lot of people.
It matters very much to us.
And, at our scale and our volume,
even if we get it right 99% of the time,
that still means we're making thousands of mistakes every day.
And every one of those mistakes is important to somebody.
For a company called Facebook,
you rarely get to see the faces behind the app.
These are the people in charge
of the biggest social network in the world.
And, with nearly a third of all humans plugged into their platform,
it's an experiment that comes with an enormous risk.
This is the world's brains being networked together
for the first time.
And so there's going to be new issues.
There's going to be new problems and we're also going to make mistakes.
For the first time,
Facebook are letting cameras inside their global organisation.
All right, everybody, we've got an amber alert activation.
Steve, you on me? Yeah. Time 15.20.
All right.
A technological playground
where some of the smartest engineers in the world
are being hired to build something no-one has built before.
When we give feedback, we give feedback in a way
that is constructive.
But we don't believe in being arseholes.
And that's like... It's straight up...
We just... We don't tolerate dicks.
But in the last year,
their experiment to connect everyone on the planet
has gone dramatically wrong.
I think it's time to ask whether
Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.
Data leaks, fake news and hacks on user security
are threatening to destroy everything they've built...
Facebook's interference in our elections and in our society
has de-stabled our democracies.
..as Facebook has suffered a year of deepening scandals
and intense media scrutiny.
This is the story of how it works,
what they're doing to fix it,
and how Facebook are quietly planning to grow even bigger.
This is the nerve centre of Facebook...
..where all data on the platform is processed and stored.
Very few outsiders have ever been in here.
So you're talking full distance so we can't see it right now.
But as a store opens you may be able to see all the way down.
But from one end of the building to the other,
you're talking about four American football fields.
This is just 1 of 15 data centres around the globe.
Connected together, they make the Facebook cloud.
At the end of this corridor, 2.3 billion people can share
anything with anyone.
It's one of the biggest anthropological experiments
of the 21st century.
We're about to step into the cloud.
It's hundreds of thousands of servers that store your likes
and your memories that you choose to share with friends and family.
It's not just a data centre.
It's not just data that's stored here.
These are people's memories,
and, you know, we take that very seriously.
Everything you do on Facebook is recorded here.
Worldwide, some 14 billion photos alone are uploaded
every single week.
These machines decide what appears in your news feed
by analysing what you've looked at before.
You go to the Facebook website and you see your news feed.
You think, you know, "How complicated can that be?"
But whatever you choose to click on
or to look at for a while
or to respond to is used to train a machine learning system,
which is basically a model of your taste.
And so that forms your alter ego
in the Facebook servers to figure out what to show you next.
These learning algorithms use this model of your taste
to match you to content you're more likely to be interested in.
Your view is not the same as any of the other billions of people.
It is custom built.
Let's go find all the different latest updates from your friends.
Let's go to get all the different videos.
Let's look at things you might be interested in.
This is happening billions, if not trillions, of times a day.
This matching process is how they make their money.
Selling to advertisers the ability to reach you.
Your data is anonymised but you are the product.
It's how they made $55.8 billion in revenue last year alone.
This is one of the largest vaults of personal data
anywhere on the planet.
And that comes with a moral responsibility.
But this is a long way from what its creators first imagined.
When Facebook launched in 2004,
it was just a website for college kids to stay in touch.
For more than a decade,
Mark Zuckerberg and a team of engineers
tried to get as many people to join as possible.
They took risks, embraced new approaches...
..and it worked.
They're now in 155 countries
with offices across the globe.
Nearly a third of all humans are connected.
So if you look at this you might think
this is actually a map of the world but it's not.
It's a blank screen and then, for every person who's using Facebook,
we put a dot on the screen,
and then where are their friend connections and we draw lines.
And when you do that,
it effectively draws the world.
I think the growth has really surprised everybody.
It's like, "Wow."
By tapping into core human needs to share, be heard,
and witness the lives of others,
they've grown a business in just 15 years
worth half $1 trillion.
For the people who work here,
it's more than just a job.
It's a mission.
I was really driven here by the mission and vision of connectivity,
of getting everyone around the world democratised access to information.
We believe it's our responsibility to bring the world together
and to give power to the community to build a better world.
This is a business that rewrote the rules for how a company should be.
Employees are encouraged to play, experiment,
and think outside the box.
You know, there are other companies, like Apple, for example,
who you know, their products need to be perfect
before they launch it.
Whereas we want to launch something quickly
and then continuously improve it.
You have to encourage people to take risks and be willing to fail
because otherwise you're just not going to achieve anything.
This successful risk-taking strategy
was embodied by their early mantra...
But as 2018 got under way, it became clear things had become
very broken indeed.
Information from millions of Facebook users may have been used
by a data company during the 2016 US presidential election.
A former employee of Cambridge Analytica claims that
50 million profiles were accessed.
The biggest data breach in Facebook history.
In March 2018, the first major scandal to rock Facebook broke.
An external app developer exploited a loophole,
enabling them to harvest the data of
87 million Facebook users as well as their friends.
This was sold to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
They allegedly used it to help political organisations
influence voters on Facebook.
Facebook faces the wrath of regulators and customers
in multiple countries.
Its reputation has sunk, along with its share price,
and a business plan based on liberal sharing of data may be under threat.
The crisis deepened when it emerged
Russia had also used Facebook to push fake news.
Facebook's interference in our elections
and in our society
has de-stabled our democracies.
To make matters worse,
the platform had become a breeding ground for hate speech
and exploitative scams.
The very connectivity and openness Facebook had built its success on
risked becoming its greatest weakness.
Join the trend of deleting Facebook altogether.
#deletefacebook.
Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress to testify.
I think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast
and broken too many things.
I think the damage done
to our democracy, relative to
Facebook and its platform
being weaponised, are incalculable.
Facebook has grown so big, so fast.
That much influence comes with
enormous social responsibility
of which you have failed to act.
For most of our existence,
we focused on all the good
that connecting people can bring.
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough
to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections,
and hate speech,
as well as developers and data privacy.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility.
And that was a big mistake.
It was my mistake and I'm sorry.
Following the crisis, it was clear that, inside Facebook,
big changes had to be made.
The aftermath of Cambridge Analytica
was very painful time for us internally.
We all deeply care about what we're doing here.
We all want to feel we're doing something positive in the world.
That, you know...that faith was a little bit crushed.
And so that was really painful for a lot of people.
Learning, you know, from...
..mistakes we've made in the past.
Let's look forward.
You know, where from here.
How do we build in order to make sure that people can trust us?
I just hope we have enough of a measure to conversation around it,
to not throw out what is a lot of powerful and good opportunity
that these tools create...
..in the pursuit of trying to limit the damage
they create alongside.
Facebook have fixed the loophole that enabled Cambridge Analytica
to harvest personal data.
But this scandal was just the beginning.
Hate speech, fake news and scams continue to affect public trust
and keep them in the media spotlight.
In response, Facebook has hired 30,000 more people
to help police the platform.
The question is - can you fix a problem so huge?
Before I came to Facebook, I was working as a criminal prosecutor
for the United States Justice Department,
and I worked on things like stopping terrorism,
responding to child abuse, human trafficking.
But one thing I've learned from working at Facebook
is the same bad behaviour that you see offline,
you're going to see online.
And so, it's about making sure
that we are creating the space for all the really great people
on the site who are coming for great reasons,
but also putting up some barriers that the bad actors
are not a part of the community.
Monica's been tasked with setting the rules
that will define what people can and cannot post.
With the aim of blocking abuse like hate speech.
In Germany, violence against refugees
has been linked to posts inciting extremism.
In Myanmar, Facebook has been used to foment hatred
against the Rohingya and other Muslims.
The UN has accused the platform of contributing to ethnic cleansing.
But with Facebook in over 155 countries,
how do you write rules allowing for freedom of speech
across every culture and religion...
..whilst also stopping abuse?
This is representative of the kind of content we're seeing
at the moment in the UK.
We have this image of a police officer,
and she's talking to a woman in a burqa holding a child,
and the text overlay here says, "Yeah, turn left, walk one mile,
"then piss off back to your own country."
We're going off the burqa as an indicator that
the woman is being attacked for being Muslim.
We wondered about how we would treat this
if the burqa was not present,
what the policy view would be on this.
Or if this was appearing somewhere where, you know,
this was critical commentary about law enforcement
and how they are not kind to immigrants who are Muslims.
When I came to Facebook, I had been living overseas
and dealing with international law for some time,
so I understood that people around the world would have
really different ideas about where our policy should be,
but one thing that I didn't anticipate was
how difficult it is to craft rules that work at our size.
With the volume of content we see every day,
we get millions of reports every week,
and so we need to craft rules that can be enforced fairly
and efficiently and quickly around the world.
Facebook has seen a huge rise in hate speech,
and with the speed language is evolving online,
they're constantly playing catch-up.
It's not always obvious if something is hate speech or not.
In this particular instance, you can see that there's no text.
We just have emojis.
So, this is two men holding hands and then a gun.
We do know that these men are often symbolising a gay couple,
so it could be an attack on the protected characteristic.
Then, obviously, with the gun here, that's a threat of violence,
so we will be taking this as an attack on gay people
and removing for hate speech.
Basically, more and more, we are seeing people
using emojis on the platform to symbolise hate.
I think it's a good example of how, like,
users are getting more creative to bypass our policies.
Yeah. Just don't put it in words. Put it in pictures or emojis. Yes.
Yeah. Absolutely.
There are no templates, really, for doing this kind of work.
Our job is to try to get ahead of it,
and we do that by talking to experts,
talking to organisations around the world,
hearing about trends that are happening in the offline world,
even before they come online,
and trying to put rules in place to address them.
This horrific word in a kind context...
Monica's rules are based on US federal law,
which protects characteristics like race, religion or gender,
but these rules also need enforcing.
Every region has its own team of content reviewers
who use the rules to decide whether a post should be removed or not.
Millions of posts are taken down every week,
but it's a challenge that is only growing.
We want Facebook to be a place where people want to come,
and we know that they aren't going to do that if it's not a safe place.
At our scale, at our volume,
even if we get it right 99% of the time,
that still means we're making thousands of mistakes every day,
and every one of those mistakes is important to somebody.
Facebook have no way of knowing
how much hate speech is on their platform.
Zuckerberg has promised thousands more reviewers
but, with billions of posts and comments every day,
it's now too big to police with manpower alone.
Without technological innovation, they're in danger of losing control.
TRAM BELL DINGS
Bonjour. Bonjour.
Mark said, you know, "How can you help us?"
He invited me to dinner at his house and we had a long chat
on what his vision was for AI and what my vision was.
When someone tells you, you know,
"Come to us and start a research lab from scratch,"
you know, it's a very interesting challenge.
Yann is a world-leading expert in artificial intelligence.
He's building Facebook's multi-million-dollar AI lab.
Currently, their AI can detect faces
and automatically take down clear abuse,
like pornography and terrorist content...
..but what's harder is getting a machine to understand the context
and meaning of a post the way a human can.
It's a huge technological challenge,
but vital if Facebook is to tackle the scale of the abuse.
What the internal systems of Facebook have to do is basically
understand text in any language, images, video, speech, whatever,
but it's difficult.
What if it's, you know, the iconic picture
of the little girl running away from napalm bombing in Vietnam, right?
That's an iconic, journalistic piece that, you know,
has historical value,
but, on the face of it, it's child pornography.
There's always a certain percentage of mistakes,
and so the question is, you know,
how to design a system to minimise those errors
without upsetting too many people, essentially.
So, the technology for this is not simple. It's not perfect yet.
Next door, one of Yann's researchers
is helping to solve some of these problems in videos.
OK, there you go.
That's the thing I wanted to show you.
Iasonas has built some AI that can read human movement -
a stepping stone to getting computers to understand context.
OK, so our system never
saw this video before.
This was a video we gathered after our system had been trained,
and this is actually, on the fly, identifying,
for every pixel that belongs to a human,
where it lands on the body's surface.
So, if I, let's say, move my arm around like this,
my joint position stays exactly the same, OK?
So, a landmark-based system is blind to this motion
while, with our system,
we can actually track the surface as it's moving around.
The objective is to be able to understand
what humans are doing in videos
so that you can understand their body language, their emotions,
what they want to do, and so on.
Of course, there are many direct connections
to the needs of Facebook -
understanding whether a post involves violence,
terrorism, propaganda or whatever.
So, you want to be able to understand
what humans are doing in images.
The vision of AI long-term is for Facebook servers
to understand the meaning and context behind every post
and comment in real time...
..spotting violence, abusive content
and even fake news before it can be shared
without the need for human review.
We see a huge advantage from technology.
Already, there are a small number of areas where the technology
can look at something that's on the site and say,
"We know this violates our policies."
And in those small set of circumstances,
that content doesn't need to go to people to make that decision.
And as time goes by, that technology is getting better and better,
and I think we'll continue to use it more and more.
This technology could be the thing
that will prevent abusive posts in the future.
But if their AI is going to be smart enough
to do the job of thousands of content reviewers,
Facebook needs their network
to have the kind of intelligence we do.
I'd like to find kind of an organising principle
that would allow us to get machines to learn
a little bit like animals and humans - by observation.
As to the question of whether it is possible to build machines
that have kind of the same level of intelligence as humans
in kind of all respects,
it's very difficult to predict how long that's going to take,
but that's pretty much a matter of time.
While Facebook have been working on a rule book
and technology to remove abusive content,
it's also become an effective weapon for organised criminals.
They call it "sextortion". Really, it's online blackmail.
Scammers can make hundreds of dollars a day,
and this crime is now happening on an industrial scale.
Criminals are using Facebook's global reach
to target victims with devastating effect...
..from human trafficking to child abuse and financial scams.
It's become such an immense challenge,
Facebook have built a new department to try to confront it.
In London, a team of specialists has been assembled
to target these types of scams and criminal behaviour.
We feel a lot more pressure to go faster.
You know, we take it personally. Some of the stuff is...
We wish we would have done more
or we see that we could have done...
We made a mistake here and there, so, you know,
we view this as our core responsibility -
to fix this.
Organised criminals are always looking
for new avenues to exploit...
..and abuse like financial scams on Facebook
are taking many different forms.
There's people who, like, claim to have ins on the betting industry,
so they'll tell people, like,
they have a guaranteed way to make money.
You see people selling, like, fake cryptocurrencies,
people selling, like, puppies,
and then, you know, extorting people for money on them.
People are pretty creative and, yeah,
they're constantly innovating, which keeps it challenging.
Stopping this serious abuse is made harder
because the majority actually come from fake Facebook accounts.
These are made to look real so users trust them,
but they're also incredibly hard to trace,
and they're a growing problem.
Every day, millions now appear on the network,
and most of them are created automatically
using computer programs.
These fake accounts are being made all over the world.
You know, there are lots and lots of ways
by which people create them.
Often, they hide their tracks.
Somebody hijacks hundreds of thousands of machines,
like the old computer-style virus,
and they use these machines all over the world
to act on their behalf.
If they can stop fake accounts, they can stop scams.
In the early days, Facebook largely relied on users
to report suspicious accounts,
leaving a lot of fake ones unchecked.
In the past year,
they've managed to develop artificial intelligence software
to analyse the behaviour of all 2.3 billion accounts
and spot the fake ones automatically.
Behaviours get reflected within the system,
you know, for example, like the geography that you're coming from,
how you connect to the internet -
all sorts of information that might not be obvious
to a human being, but it makes a ton of sense to a computer.
I'll give you a very simplified example.
You know, most people have, you know, a relationship,
maybe multiple relationships at the same time.
You're not likely to have
50 online romantic relationships all going at once at various stages,
so that looks suspicious.
Their new AI has been observing the way people interact,
looking for anomalies in account history.
Since the beginning of the year,
it's taken down more than a billion fake accounts.
It's the most powerful defence they have,
so filming the code is not allowed.
INTERVIEWER: Where essentially is the artificial intelligence?
We don't publish the exact techniques that we use.
It's...
The artificial intelligence, or the machine learning,
is running actually in data centres in various places.
What you're seeing here are people who are building programs
that collect the data needed to actually make these things work.
In spite of this, more appear every day,
because the people on the other side
keep finding new ways to cheat their AI.
When something starts working, for example, a detection technique,
we see people going, "Let's try this a little bit."
These guys actually poke and prod
and test defences actively all the time.
You know, every once in a while, they'll find a hole,
and we need to make sure we detect when they find a hole,
and plug it, and we keep moving forward like that.
Facebook is caught in a new kind of cyber war.
All of them are getting more and more advanced.
People are pouring resources and money into it,
and the more money they can make,
the more money they are going to be willing to spend
to kind of break your systems.
What is your greatest threat?
What is my greatest threat?
Staying on top of it.
That's like, if we don't stay on top of it,
we know, like, if we just stand still,
we know we will lose.
So, it's kind of like...
Anyway, that's it.
By the summer of 2018,
Facebook's problems were deepening...
..from failure to protect personal data
to inciting hate crime and scams.
It all came to a head in July.
Facebook is to be fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner.
That's the maximum fine possible for misuse of data in the UK.
Facebook is going to have to cough up
because it failed to protect users' information
from the third-party firm Cambridge Analytica.
The proposed fine for Facebook
may be small change for an online giant,
but it's still a powerful statement of intent,
and in future, fines could be much bigger.
In spite of all the scandals, half a million more people
are still signing up to Facebook every single day.
Despite the negative rolling news coverage,
inside Facebook,
the business of keeping the platform running goes on.
The staff are continuing to move fast
and embrace the unique hack culture that's got them this far.
This is an organisation that rewards risk
and embraces failure.
Every few months, each office get together
for their own 24-hour lock-in
where staff are encouraged to innovate and try new ideas.
It's what they call a "hackathon"
and it's how they came up with the "like" button.
Coding? It's like cooking, big man.
You work for hours to find the perfect recipe,
and once you've found it, bingo - you sell it to the world.
At Facebook, all employees have two birthdays -
their own and their Faceversary,
which they celebrate each year they're at the company.
They have Bring Your Family To Work Days,
Pride events,
and they get celebrities in to inspire the workforce.
They even have a small village with bikes, shops and an arcade.
Everything is free, so everyone can focus on connecting the world.
To help fix the scale of the problems that have been exposed,
they're hiring more engineers at a staggering rate.
These are the people who will be responsible
for taking Facebook into the future.
Today, they're being initiated into the unique culture.
If you haven't already, on the left-hand side of the room,
you can fill in a name badge.
In the last year, they've hired more than 10,000 people.
Every week, 50 new engineers arrive in London.
Hello, everyone. This is Ray Ming from China,
and I will be joining the London office as a software engineer.
Hi, my name's Marina, joining in London. Originally Russian.
With the company set to double in the next few years,
it's these engineers they're now relying on to fix things,
as well as grow the business.
When we say this is now your company, we really mean it.
This isn't just any other company. This is now YOUR company.
So, it's in your hands to make this company better or worse.
When we give feedback, we give feedback in a way that is constructive
and it's not just showing that you are the smartest person in the room.
We do talk about feedback being a gift,
but we don't believe in being arseholes, and that's like...
It's straight up. We just... We don't tolerate dicks.
Everything we do, we're doing to connect people,
and we're doing to try and bring social value in that connection.
That means that every product decision that we make
is tuned for, "Does it do good in the world?"
We're not a company that's designed to make money.
We're a company that's designed to create communities
and let those communities make a difference in the world.
We think about money as a secondary thing.
With a revenue of over $55 billion,
Facebook have the power to scoop up the best engineers on the planet
with their own unique approach to recruitment.
New employees are called "noobs" and go through a six-week boot camp
where they're introduced to the many departments.
This face-tracking technology
allows us to know exactly where your eyes are,
and that allowed you to actually superimpose funny glasses,
or anything you really wanted.
Most noobs don't apply for a specific job.
They're allowed to choose where they work.
It's supposed to make sure they end up taking on problems
they care about most,
but it means each department has to pitch to prospective employees.
It's an unfortunate fact that there are a lot of people
who are trying to reach out to minors
on all kinds of platforms, including ours,
for inappropriate purposes.
We also have to worry about all kinds of things
where people give signals on the platform
that something terrible might happen.
The most interesting thing here is just the mind-set
is completely different.
Engineers are the ones driving the change,
whereas, in other companies, usually, it's the managers
passing the change downwards.
It's a big difference. I have to get used to it.
You know, it's Facebook,
so everything you do here is on such scale.
Whatever small change you make is going to reach so many people.
You need to think how you make -
well, it's kind of a cliche - but the impact.
Big smiles. Three, two, one. CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
Awesome.
NEWSREADER: Facebook has recorded the biggest fall
in corporate history as shares dropped by 20%,
wiping about $120 billion off the company's market value.
It comes after Facebook released its latest earnings report
and warned of decelerating revenue growth.
User growth is slowing and the amount that it's making
in advertising revenue per user is also declining.
At the end of July, Facebook announced that,
for the first time in its 14-year history,
user growth was slowing.
The news immediately wiped $119 billion
off the company's market value -
the most dramatic single-day share price decline
in US stock market history.
At the same time,
Facebook are spending billions building eight new data centres
to double capacity in the next few years.
We're about five and a half months in on this project here.
The exterior skins are going on.
They're just progressing one right behind the next.
To improve connectivity between data centres,
they're laying thousands of miles of fibre optic cable under the sea.
They're also constructing offices in almost every continent
to house their rapidly growing workforce.
We've got big projects going on
in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Singapore, Dublin,
New York, Austin.
We've probably got upwards of 60 projects going on
around the world at the moment.
Their financial responsibilities are huge and increasing every day.
But in spite of everything over the past year,
they're still determined to grow...
..and they plan to use their connectivity
to push into some unexpected areas.
Facebook is built around trends
in the way users interact on their platform.
It's a way of building things
they believe people really want or need...
..making it a more essential part of people's everyday lives.
This entire area out here is the Social Good team.
We have charitable giving,
we have mentorship, we have crisis response,
and this part out here is the blood donations team
Hema runs a team in a department called Social Good.
They're building products that tackle health issues
like blood shortage - a big problem in the developing world.
According to the World Health Organization,
there are 70 countries with a shortage of blood...
..where those in need have to look for their own.
So, Hema and her team are trying to see
if they can find a way to solve this problem worldwide
using Facebook.
The highest shortage manifests itself
on platforms like ours
as people looking for other people to donate blood.
It's an emergency reaction
of people who are put under stressful conditions
where they have to go find their own blood donors.
I call it the BYOB system - Bring Your Own Blood.
But that's not how countries want to operate.
Sustainable supply comes from
how do we connect these donors to opportunities?
I see the problem statement as,
country X needs 1% of its population to donate.
That's a problem. Country X isn't achieving that outcome.
We're going to try to help country X solve that problem.
About five years ago, my dad was diagnosed with
lung and liver cancer.
He was losing about a litre of blood every day.
And the doctors in the hospital were like,
"We're going to do our best to help find him units of blood,
"but we really will need more donors to come in."
My siblings and I got on the phone
and called every friend and every family member that we knew of,
and they called other people.
We eventually lost him three months later,
but that left a pretty strong mark for me.
We want 1% of each country's population
to be donating every year, or however we calculate that.
But there would be a metric and it would be based on donations.
Let's imagine we could create a real-time efficient market for blood
where all the demand was actually
accurately expressed on the platform,
and you didn't have to wait eight years for the WHO to tell you
what the blood need was in Pakistan two years ago.
You'd just be like, "Oh, Pakistan needed 800,000 units last year
"and it was all on Facebook."
I mean, you know, like, aspirational goal.
The team are going to build a blood donation hub
to connect potential donors to those in need,
which will appear in people's News Feeds in India.
They're not charging for the service,
but you can't access it without a Facebook account.
INTERVIEWER: When you try and make the world better,
it comes with a risk you'll make it worse.
How do you feel about the risks and responsibilities
of taking on big social problems?
The social problem, depending on what it is,
IS the risk to the world.
So, we've got to do a better job
of making sure that we don't let bad actors use the platform
in ways that'll harm the social fabric.
One philosophy to approach this is, are we going to stop doing good
because there's going to be a little bad in the world?
I don't think so. I don't think we should.
Building services that meet more fundamental human needs
also makes Facebook more of an essential tool
and gives users a reason to stay.
Like a genie released from a bottle, Facebook have built a tool
that's allowed the world to move and connect faster than ever before.
But in doing so, old laws and systems
built over hundreds of years are struggling to keep up...
..and yet Facebook is looking for even more ways
to get the last remaining humans online.
This is called Terragraph.
So, this is an outdoor enclosure Wi-Fi routeing system
using millimetre wave technology.
We have this deployed in a few cities around the world.
You can log in, for example, to San Jose right down the street
and get 1.06 gigabits per second, up and down, for free.
This military-grade wireless technology
can transmit the world's fastest internet across entire cities.
They've also been building satellites and high-altitude drones
to beam the internet to remote places
where most of the developing world live.
If you study civilisations throughout the world,
access to information is actually key.
When you understand how other villages are governing themselves,
you start to have more information
about what's going to work for you and what's not.
Sexual health awareness, so you can get rid of some of the disease
and empower women around their ability to control their bodies.
Low-irrigation farming techniques - how valuable would that be
to villagers in some developing country?
Now they're able to more efficiently use their resources
to feed their villages, feed their populations.
By providing faster internet for free,
they're removing barriers to information,
but that also allows more people to access their apps.
Everywhere, teams across Facebook are pushing ahead,
finding ever more ways to make the platform indispensable.
All right, everybody, we've got an AMBER Alert activation.
All right, we've got an AMBER Alert. Listen up.
Generate the activity report for the documentation,
send out the SMS notification to the leadership team,
let them know.
Facebook operates a centre for global security
where they're able to directly send alerts into people's News Feeds.
They regularly run drills to help search for missing children.
It's a tool on which the police are increasingly reliant.
At least once a day,
sometimes several times a day, we'll have an alert.
They usually come in from the police department
where it's reported to.
All right, KP's good. Get approval, please.
You're good.
Obviously, law enforcement has their ways of pushing stuff out to people,
but not the kind of access we have to people.
You know, with the billions of users we have around the world,
it's quite a powerful tool.
Because Facebook gather user data like location status,
they can let people know when a child has gone missing near them.
When you've got a child's life on the line,
we want to be as quick as humanly possible.
All right, I'll push this out to public.
HE EXHALES
All clear. Good job, team.
If you're a general public user right now
and you're in this region where we sent this to -
obviously, it's a drill, it's not going out -
but if it did, everybody would now get the alert
and they'd see the same thing I just saw.
Hopefully there's enough information there for someone to find them.
It's not known how many children have been found using this system,
however, police call Facebook for an alert almost every day.
By becoming a kind of emergency service,
they're providing an essential tool.
Facebook offers access to billions of people,
but these services are in the hands of a private company.
It raises questions about what activity,
if any, should be off limits.
After months of planning, Facebook are about to launch
its new blood donations hub in India.
With the click of a button,
300 million people will be able to connect to donation centres
that have a shortage of blood all over the country,
and maybe it will encourage some of the other billion people in India
to sign up, too.
OK, this is what the blood donation hub looks like.
At the top is a map of the user's city
and dots indicating all the opportunities
for them to donate nearby, but...
..we also have requests which are from individuals.
Either they're in need of blood,
or often it's their family member in need of blood,
and they'll post using our tools
and we can notify donors in our database
who have the same blood type
and are within a certain geographic area,
and who have indicated to us that they want to donate
and they want to help.
In the US, we take it for granted that,
if you go to the hospital and you need surgery,
the blood will be there for you.
As India begins to wake up, they launch their new hub...
..and, within minutes, users begin to respond.
Come on, guys. Share, share, share. Whoa! Whoa! There she is.
Oh, man! Where are we at?
So, there's been 15,000 hub views so far. 15,000 hub views?
Oh, man!
Not bad. Not bad at all.
People are sharing it, they're commenting on it,
they're liking it. Like, it's really blowing up.
Hey, it was worth building it. It was definitely worth building it.
Since launching the new feature,
more than 11 million people have signed up
to donate blood on Facebook.
I believe there should never be anybody
who would have to go look for a blood donor ever
because there always exists safe blood
in their blood banks near them.
Something that would have changed my life five years ago.
Initiatives like these have the potential to save lives,
but already there have been reports that the service could be exploited
by the black market.
Several public health officials in India warn that the tech project,
although well-meaning,
risks fuelling a dangerous black market for blood
and harming the country's fragile blood collection system.
Facebook has a huge capacity to encourage others to do good,
but its recent history of scandals raises further questions
as to how safe we are sharing sensitive data with them.
And as they continue to push forwards,
the scandals show no sign of slowing down.
The Business Secretary Greg Clark has called a security breach
affecting millions of Facebook users "a very worrying development".
At least 50 million Facebook users have had their accounts hacked.
Another huge security breach at the world's biggest social network.
The latest security hack raises huge questions
about the company's ability to protect the user data
of nearly a third of the world's population...
..and it throws into question
the effectiveness of their efforts to fix Facebook so far.
Every single day, they're facing more and more of these challenges.
Overnight, some behaviour they'd never seen before
was detected on the network,
so Vlad has called an urgent meeting.
Users around the world were getting friend requests
from someone they didn't know - a fake account.
But this wasn't stopped by their artificial intelligence
because the account behaved in an unusual way.
So, what happened was
the profile changed its name, started friending a bunch of people,
and you can see friend rejects...
A lot of them... I mean, a lot of these were rejects.
And immediately after that, it changed it back.
It appears the fake account changed its profile name
and gender twice to try to avoid detection.
So, they're switching and then switching back? Yes.
This is kind of interesting in a sense that
they're not throwing away their account.
Usually, it used to be they would go in,
you know, create an account, make it sort of look reasonable,
and then start scamming,
and then, you know, we would take it down.
Now they're taking it back to make it look reasonable again,
which is weird.
Vlad's worried this could be organised criminals
trying to see if they can find a weakness in the system.
If they can avoid detection with one account,
they could do it en masse and start posting scams on the platform.
First of all, we need to figure out if this is common enough,
and then we should figure out what's the underlying pattern behind this.
Sometimes, a back door gets discovered,
and then it blows up, the same like they discovered BLEEP,
and then just follow the magic recipe.
If you assume that there's a whole organisation behind this
because they have lots of people you need to organise and all that,
then you end up kind of finding those structures,
and that's what you really want to go after.
Cool. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
By studying this fake account and its behaviour,
they should be able to retrain their artificial intelligence
to block any others like them and, in doing so,
hopefully prevent any users from being scammed.
INTERVIEWER: Do you take this stuff home
or are you able to switch off?
It's hard sometimes.
You know, sometimes, you go home, and, you know, some days,
like, it's a rough day and you'll feel it at home.
2018 was the year that rocked Facebook to its core
and woke the world up to its reach and influence over society.
A year on, they've announced plans to fundamentally shift
how Facebook works by making it more focused on user privacy.
Facebook has a history of promising things
when regulators come knocking, when critics start writing,
when reporters come to their door,
promising things in terms of safety and in terms of privacy
and then not delivering on them.
Whether or not they deliver on their promises,
it's clear that whoever has control over our personal data
also holds the key to immense power.
This raises a bigger question
of who decides what is right and wrong
in a fast-evolving world.
Whether it's because of an event in the world
or an election that's happening
or some sort of new trend among young people,
there's always something that makes us think,
"Do we have these lines in the right place?"
What kinds of information are users comfortable sharing?
And how much do they deserve to know about the ways
in which their data is used?
Whether it will ultimately become a force for good or bad
depends now on Facebook's ability to regain control
of the genie they've released on the world.
I really liken it to when
we were building railroads for the first time.
We built the railroads because we wanted to get from A to B.
We actually had no idea the economies,
the societal growth that would happen
by building those connections.
We're at a very similar place with the internet,
with being able to share information around the world in moments.
How do you maximise all of those good things
that come from connecting people
while also mitigating some of the negativity
that can come alongside it?
It will take a collective effort of many people
across private sector and public sector
and academia and government
to come together and raise the important questions.
How should we operate a society when everyone really does have a voice?
The last year has been challenging, but it's also been the year where
we went from being this naively optimistic child
to being a slightly more mature adult.
And we're now on this path of,
you know, accepting our responsibility.
You know, this is a very new world.
Everything we're doing is brand-new...
..and that comes with painful learnings.