♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And, today, how Big Tech is reshaping the global order.

At a time when companies like Facebook and Google have never been more influential, they're also facing increased government scrutiny.

In a piece I just wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine, I discuss why some of the biggest tech companies in the world are essentially becoming digital nation-states.

They generate more revenue than the GDPs of most countries, and their diplomatic priorities are, of course, very different than the governments that are supposed to regulate them.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I've got just the guy to do it -- Nick Thompson.

He's C.E.O.

of The Atlantic and former WIRED editor in chief.

And then, veteran Filipina journalist and this year's Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa on how her country's authoritarian government and its supporters have co-opted social media to discredit her.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> ♪ Sorry, sorry, sorry ♪ ♪ Not sorry, not sorry, sorry ♪ ♪ Sorry, sorry, not sorry, not sorry, sorry ♪ >> But, first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... and by.... ♪♪ >> On Monday, October 4th, Facebook and its companion services, Instagram and WhatsApp, disappeared from the Internet for more than five hours.

>> Hundreds of millions of people around the world using some of the most popular social-media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have been forced offline in a major global blackout.

>> During this time, roughly 3.5 billion users had to seek alternative ways to communicate with friends and family, to advertise to consumers, and perhaps most problematically, to be influenced by influencers.

Facebook blamed the blackout on a botched maintenance attempt, and while a Google or Microsoft outage would have been more catastrophic, this blackout showed just how dependent the world has become on a company that is already under the gun.

Critics and conspiracy theorists were quick to point out the suspicious timing of the blackout, which occurred just one day after a Facebook whistleblower revealed herself in a bombshell "60 Minutes" interview.

But the broader point -- never has a small group of companies held such an expansive influence over humanity, and in this new digital territory, governments have little idea what to do.

It's a reality that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison grappled with earlier this year, when Google threatened to stop making its search tool available Down Under in response to increased regulation.

>> You know, you can't have these platforms with a business model which is about being in the Wild West forever.

The sheriff turns up eventually.

>> Will the sheriff turn up this time?

Whether it's Australia or the United States or the EU or China, no government today has the toolbox to tinker with Big Tech, which is why I think it's time to start thinking of the biggest tech companies as bona fide digital nation-states.

No, I'm not saying you'll be pledging allegiance to the United States of Apple anytime soon, but they're writing our Social Contract 2.0, whether or not we know it.

"Wait, wait, wait," you say.

"There have been powerful companies before."

Does anyone remember the East India Company?

What about Big Oil?

In its heyday, Exxon was a more important partner for many foreign countries than the U.S. government.

But all of these companies operated in physical space, meat space, as we like to say, where governments with guns ultimately hold sway.

Big Tech is different.

It's creating an entirely new dimension of geopolitics in digital space, where the rules, at least as far as we can see and experience, are very different.

And that's because Big Tech companies aren't just competing with governments to regulate how information moves around or whose accounts get banned for -- I don't know -- fomenting a coup against Congress, they're also designing the substance of digital space itself, right down to individual lines of code.

And there's more.

Big Tech companies are increasingly providing basic security and cybersecurity and essential real-world goods and services.

This influence will only grow as more of our daily lives, work, and the infrastructure that powers, entirely, cities and economies comes to rely on digital connectivity.

Today, I'm discussing all that and more with a man who has grappled with the thorniest tech issues of our time and lived to tell the tale.

Nick Thompson, C.E.O.

of The Atlantic and former WIRED editor in chief, joins the show.

Here's our conversation.

Nick, we've known each other a long time.

What's the thing that has changed your life the most in terms of technology?

>> The way technology has changed media is kind of interesting, in that the work actually hasn't really shifted that much, right?

The kinds of stories that I edited when I was 24 four years old versus 44 years old are not different, really, in any way.

I hope they're better 'cause I'm better at it, but it's more or less the exact same stories of the same length.

And it's one of the most interesting things about technology, that it both massively distracts us, but also increases our ability to comprehend complex thoughts, right?

For reasons we could get into, but net-net, it means that the form of long-form narrative journalism has stayed more or less, like, in steady state since I started, which is super-interesting.

But the distribution has turned upside down, right?

The way we read them, right?

I mean, we read them all on phones.

We read them -- you know, get the key ideas parsed out on Twitter.

Like, the way that they're distributed and consumed has completely changed, and the way that the economics of the industry have completely changed, right?

So technology -- The way magazines were supported when I started, people entirely supported them through advertisements, because if you wanted to reach people about, you know -- I don't know -- any kind of bundle of humans, magazines were created to create bundles of humans, and then the Internet came along, and there are much better ways to create bundles of humans.

So the whole business model got completely turned upside down, turned inside out, changed completely, whereas the content really didn't change at all.

>> Now, when I think about WIRED and when WIRED first came into my consciousness, I thought about a magazine that was about people that geeked out on gadgets.

It was tech boosterism.

That is not what WIRED was when you were at the helm.

How do you think we think about technology now, both through your role there and more broadly?

>> Yeah.

You know, the story of WIRED is a pretty good story, I think, in some ways, about the way -- the role of technology in American life.

It did very much start out as that, right?

WIRED is the place -- You know, WIRED is the land west of California called the future, right?

And it was a magazine about optimism, right?

And it was the notion that change is good, right?

We had that with one of our slogans early on, and that was a good marketing slogan.

It was believed by the early founders of WIRED, but by the time I took the helm of WIRED -- I became the editor in chief in 2017 -- you know, right after -- I started -- you know, my last day at The New Yorker, two days before I started at WIRED, was the inauguration of Donald Trump.

It was pretty hard to argue that change is good at that point.

And so I would joke that, you know, the slogan of my predecessor was "WIRED is where the future's realized," and under me, it was going to be "WIRED is where the future is realized and the present is fixed."

>> One of the covers that was most famous, certainly got the most notoriety, under your tenure was showing Mark Zuckerberg beaten and bruised.

And, yet, if you did that cover today, you probably would have added a few more marks to his face.

What kind of a corporate citizen is Facebook and is Mark today, in your view?

>> So, that was in 2018, and I -- You know, it was a story about, you know, what had happened to Facebook, you know, basically following the election in '16 through the following year.

And it was a story about a company that was trying to figure out its role in society.

It was a company struggling to understand itself.

And, you know, sort of the arc of the story described the way that Facebook, in a desperate attempt to appease or keep Republicans at bay, willfully blinded itself to what was happening on the platform during the election.

So, at the end of that story, there's a long section about the algorithmic changes that Facebook was making, and they were doing something called meaningful social interactions.

And the idea then was, they were going to change the core algorithm of the News Feed to prioritize reactions among family and friends.

And the idea was to make Facebook better, to solve -- Like, this would be a way to solve some of the fake-news problems, some of the Russian-misinformation problems, some of the sort of the hostility problems.

Those algorithmic changes, the things that made up the last section of the piece, we finally know what their effect is because of the documents released by the whistleblower.

And it turns out that those algorithmic changes were totally baleful.

They actually didn't do anything good.

What happened was, by prioritizing comments and engagement across friends and family, it seemed to fail Facebook with, actually, more posts where people were just screaming at each other, and, like, posts where people would say toxic things, you know, did very well under those algorithmic changes.

>> And, to be fair, there's nothing the whistleblower said directly that would lead you in any other direction than that, right?

>> Yeah, I mean, the whistleblower actually, you know, in a way, has a view of Facebook somewhat similar to mine, in that, you know, as she said -- You know, Frances Haugen goes on in the testimony and she says, "Look, I don't want to destroy Facebook.

I want to fix Facebook," right?

And my view is the same.

The problems that Facebook creates are fixable, and I'm extremely interested in those solutions.

I don't just dismiss Facebook as, you know, some evil tobacco company poisoning our minds.

>> As we think about not just Facebook, but all of these very, very large and powerful technology companies, most of which are in the United States and China, is, first, that they operate in this digital world that they create, and, as a consequence, they exercise a level of sovereignty that makes it very hard both to understand what is driving their business and to think about how one might go about regulating it.

How do you think about this new type of virtual or digital power that is exerted by these corporations?

>> I mean, I think it's something we've never grappled with, and I actually think it's now -- Some point in the last like couple years, it's gotten even crazier, because, you know, back when I was reporting on that first Facebook story, the way the Facebook algorithm worked is, there were a bunch of inputs and a bunch of levers, right?

And you can imagine somebody in a control room and they're like, "You weight likes by 5% or you weight them by 4 and you weight reshares by 3%," right?

And you have a bunch of outcomes you're looking for.

And now, it's just an A.I.

system optimized for whatever it's optimized for.

The most interesting question of Facebook is like, does anybody know exactly what this algorithm is optimized for?

>> Let's then go from there to the tech companies themselves.

So, you know, tech companies start out, and it's "Don't be evil" and it's "I want to make the place a better planet."

I mean, the reality is that these tech companies have very different models.

And I'm wondering which models you think are likely to be most successful.

Do you see them becoming more national champions with the U.S. or with democracies, with China, or is it going to be a very different model, where digital space just becomes something completely other and separate from governments that don't work very well?

What do you think about that?

>> If you look at the U.S. companies, they're quite different models for how they've dealt with those challenges.

To some degree, they've all pursued the same -- They all have drifted away from the idealism.

They all have hired lots of lobbyists.

They all have started working with the government to some degree.

They all are oppositional to the government to the other degrees.

But I actually think, if you look more carefully and you put the big companies under, you know, more of a magnifying glass, Google has probably worked harder to maintain its culture and the sense of, like, creative geniuses, still taking Fridays off, and in some of the "don't be evil" aesthetics.

And I think that Google has probably worked harder to maintain their culture.

I think Microsoft has probably worked most successfully to sort of become a partner of the United States government and a company that is seen as a champion for freedom and democracy and, you know, all the work they do against hackers.

Facebook has, I think, obviously been a company that has struggled the most.

Sort of earned the admonition of everybody across government, where a lot of the internal culture has has become frayed.

Obviously, it needs to repair on both of those issues.

So right now, they're sort of subservient to the state.

My guess is that, over time, the large tech companies, whether it's in the United States -- China is a whole different matter, so let's just talk about the U.S. -- just gradually become more and more powerful, and the state becomes less and less powerful relative to them.

>> China has a robust private sector that is the largest part of their economy.

It's certainly the most productive part.

And in the digital space, it has played a very strong role that now the Chinese government is increasingly uneasy with trying to rein in, in lots of ways.

>> It's so interesting, because up until -- I don't know -- six months ago, I would have said the model in China is completely different, right?

They're state champions.

You know, they're working with the large tech companies to help advantage them over the American tech companies.

And then, you know, Jack Ma disappears, and it's like, "Wait, wait.

What's going on?"

There's been a massive shift that I did not anticipate in the way that the CCP views its tech sector.

And, you know, one of the interesting questions will be, what is the -- Like, there is a chance it ultimately makes the Chinese tech sector more efficient, right?

If you have, like, less government championing of particular winners, maybe you have more competition, right?

There are a number of people who have written about China who actually feel like this could be a useful move to increase the relative power of Chinese tech, because you won't have large, inefficient companies that are beholden to the government and the government to be beholden to.

My guess, though, is that -- I mean, there's been a trillion dollars in market-cap valuation wiped away over the last few months in China because of the moves of the government?

You know, in an interesting way, the executives at Microsoft and Amazon and Google and Facebook must be thinking, "Hmm.

Well, maybe if the Chinese government isn't backing them all, maybe there's -- you know, maybe we can win in more markets."

>> So Nick, LinkedIn has just said that they are shuttering their social-media operations in the People's Republic because of complications of being able to operate there.

And a number of journalists have been deplatformed recently as questions around why.

Do you -- Tell me how you think about these companies, the interoperability of this -- of these interactions of human beings that should be connected between our two countries.

>> Yeah.

So, I am -- I have a minority view among my peers that operating in China is a huge social good for the world.

And I think -- You know, I wish Google did more in China.

I wish Facebook -- You know, Facebook obviously wants to be in China, can't remotely be in China.

Like, I'm glad Apple sells a lot of phones in China.

The question is, operating in China requires you, at a certain point, to weigh those benefits against holding your principles.

And so I don't know -- And, obviously, there's a line that you can't cross.

And it sounds like what happened at LinkedIn is, they probably went in with something like a philosophy like mine of "This is good for the world, net-net, to connect people."

Like, I certainly want people in China be able to see, you know, the things I put on LinkedIn.

I think it's good for them to see it.

I think it's good for me to see reciprocal things in China.

I think it's good for me to connect with people in China.

It makes the world better.

But, you know, if, indeed, LinkedIn has been -- you know, the Chinese government has said, "You have to deplatform these people, you have to delete these posts," at some point, you cross a line you can't justify.

>> If you were the C.E.O.

of one of these enormous technology companies, what is the one no-regrets move that you would really like to make that you think would make a positive difference?

>> I would overhaul the way the core algorithm works at either YouTube or Facebook.

And I would optimize it not for engagement or money, but I would optimize it for whatever the most sophisticated metric I could come up with for, you know, deep human satisfaction.

And so I would change the -- I would change the way the fundamental nature of the way the core product works, and I'm convinced that would be the right thing to do.

>> Good to be with you, my friend.

>> Thanks for having me on.

>> On October 8th, veteran Filipina journalist Maria Ressa was awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize, along with Russian journalist Dmitry A. Muratov for "Their courageous fight for freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace."

Ressa, a frequent target of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, was a guest on my show last year.

She spoke of how her country's authoritarian government and its supporters had co-opted social media to try to discredit her reporting and paint her as a criminal.

In fact, she said, social-media algorithms facilitated the attacks.

>> The online violence is real.

It started in 2016.

And it started with the threats, you know, and then became very creative.

Then I became every animal you can think of.

And then it just got really -- It used gender, my facial features, my skin color.

It's horrid, in that sense.

And if I wasn't an optimistic person, you know, it's like it's meant to incite hate.

And that's part of what I feel the platforms are responsible for, because they've allowed it to happen and they allow it to continue.

Social media is a behavioral-modification system, and, essentially, it knows us better than we know ourselves, because we put it in, uses machine learning and then artificial intelligence, and then sells our weakest moment, our most vulnerable moment to a message to the highest bidder, whether that's a government or a company.

The message seeded in 2016 was, "Maria Ressa is not a journalist.

She's a criminal."

And it was -- The first time you read it, it's like, "It doesn't matter, because it's so ridiculous.

She's obviously not a criminal.

Look at her track record."

Track record doesn't matter anymore in the age of social media.

But repeated a million times, followed in 2017 by the same words coming out of government officials and President Duterte himself saying that, and then, in 2018, the 11 cases and investigations, in 2019, the arrest warrants, and then, in 2020, a conviction.

So what's real and what's not criminal?

Journalist or criminal?

That is how we change reality.

That is how death by a thousand cuts happens of our democracy.

That is how President Duterte is the most, the best leader the Philippines has ever had.

It's buoyed by this propaganda machine.

This is huge, and I think it's not just the Philippines.

These cheap armies on social media have rolled democracy back all around the world.

Let's look at the United States.

That's a perfect example -- right?

-- of something that was seeded in 2016 and then erupts in 2020.

The Mueller Report -- this is already documented that Russian disinformation networks targeted Americans.

And one of the fissure lines of society that was pounded on both sides split wide open.

It is race and identity.

Black Lives Matter was targeted in 2016, and here we go, right?

So, again, this stuff that happens on social media -- it erupts in the real world.

>> What's the response been that you've gotten from Facebook execs?

>> I think there are individuals inside Facebook who know how bad it is.

I mean, look, this is part of the reason, in 2016, I didn't really think we had to go to regulation, because I thought the tech people are like journalists.

Like, we will self-regulate, right?

Journalists were the gatekeepers for many, many, many, many years, right?

And we had that principle.

We had standards and ethics, the mission of journalism.

We protected the public sphere.

Well, we lost that power to tech.

Tech took it, made money off of it, but abdicated responsibility for protecting the public sphere.

>> Yeah, they do not want to be journalists.

They do not want to be treated as journalists.

They have no interest in it.

>> And, yet, they're the world's largest distributor of news, right?

And this is, I think, what Facebook is grappling with right now, because they don't want to.

They are using these laws to kind of do their own acrobatics.

But the reality is, there are people inside Facebook -- we've seen this now -- who do believe that they are not doing -- that they're becoming evil, if they aren't already, and that they're trying to change it.

And I would say -- You know, I've met Mark Zuckerberg.

I think he's a really bright young man.

And when I met him, I thought, "My God, he's facile, he's agile, and, yet, he doesn't know enough to protect against his own weaknesses."

This idea where he says, "This is a freedom-of-speech issue" is just garbage.

This is not a freedom-of-speech issue.

This is a distribution issue.

Facebook and other social-media platforms allow lies laced with anger and hate to spread faster and further than facts, which are really boring.

You cannot have integrity of markets you cannot have integrity of elections if you make facts debatable.

>> And now to "Puppet Regime," where Facebook C.E.O.

Mark Zuckerberg has some apologizing to do.

>> ♪ Sorry, sorry, sorry ♪ ♪ Not sorry, not sorry, sorry ♪ ♪ Sorry, sorry, not sorry, not sorry, sorry ♪ Oh, hey, it's me, Mark Zuckerberg, C.E.O.

of...your life.

Now, various actual humans have told me lately that I have a bit of a P.R.

problem, so I'm going to go ahead and apologize again.

Let's see how it goes this time.

Let's start with the outage on October 4th.

To all the businesses who were affected, I am truly, truly sorry that you're so dependent on me to reach your customers.

God, can't you guys sell stuff on your own?

What?

That's not an apology?

God!

God!

Human emotions are so weird.

Okay, let's try another one.

To Congress, I'm so sorry that, after all these hearings and investigations, you guys still don't, like, understand how the Internet actually works.

Are we done?

What?

There's apologies for the rest of the world, too?

God!

To Europe, I'd just like to say I'm so, so sorry that you don't have any big tech companies of your own.

Grow some before you tell me what to do with mine.

Geez.

And to Xi Jinping, look, I am sorry, but you are not going to be the only person using technology to control a billion people out here.

You are not, because, in the end, we are a global superpow... ...super-chill company that prides itself on bringing people together.

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see or you just want to understand how technology companies are going to become our new overlords, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.

It's on the Internet.

♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... and by....