Dan Pfeiffer

What level of concern does that give you beyond just the dangers of these algorithms to begin with?

That's an important point because the Facebook algorithm became a vehicle for right-wing content when Mark Zuckerberg was still a Barack Obama supporter.

It's that Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, the folks at Breitbart and Daily Caller sort of figured out early on how to hack the algorithm.

What are the things –

And I remember sitting in the White House in 2014 when really Facebook really sort of blew up both as a major source of news for people, as the news feed became a certain way, and as right-wing messaging really sort of surfaced a lot.

I remember sitting in focus groups after –

Do you remember the IRS scandal when there was these, which turned out to be a bunch of bullshit, but that all the, that there was this accusation that a bunch of, that Obama had some have gotten a bunch of people in a Cincinnati IRS office to scrutinize Tea Party groups.

And I thought it was one of those things, when it blew up in Washington, and I understood why it blew up.

It's like the IRS involved in politics that has echoes of Watergate.

It's going to get attention.

But prior to that, we would always in the White House have these situations where it's like, there'd be this big thing that like dominate Politico and CNN.

Then we would do focus groups and people in around the country would have no idea what we were talking about.

Just not a clue.

We did focus groups on the IRS thing, and everyone knew.

And then there was a VA scandal, which is the kind of thing that doesn't really blow up in the same way.

We did focus groups again.

Everyone knew.

And every time they were sort of reading back, they were framing it to us in right-wing terms.

And when the moderator asked people why, where they got this information, the answer was Facebook.

And it's like, and they had sort of, and the right had sort of figured out how to like, you know, it was like those Breitbart headlines that were just like so offensive that they would generate so much outrage, which would generate so many comments, which would generate so much engagement.