(suspenseful music)
- [Director] A Camera is rolling.
- Facebook is an incredibly
ambitious company.
You could make the case
that ambition did blind them
to a lot of the potential dangers
of what they were creating.
- [Reporter] On college campuses,
it's called the Facebook.com.
- Our Facebook Dilemma
film traces us through
how Facebook has grown
and the implications
that it's had for democracy in our world.
- Facebook is a very secretive company
and former employees are loathe to talk
so it's been a huge challenge for us
to kind of find people
who have inside knowledge
about how the company made
its decisions over time
and how they were recognizing
the myriad ways
that things could be taken advantage of.
- To what degree is it
anybody's responsibility
as a technology platform
or as a distributor
to start to decide when
you've gone over the line
between something that is clearly false
from something that may
or may not be perceived
by everybody to be clearly false
and potentially can do damage?
- This turned you and I into products.
Our entire being and everything we think,
and everything we wanna
buy and everything we like
and everything we don't like is monetized
by somebody who wants to sell us something
even if it's a political
idea or maybe it's a hat.
- The challenge that Facebook
is dealing with right now
is that it is too big to
figure out how to navigate
a multitude of issues that it's facing.
- The idea that fake news
on Facebook influenced
the election in any way I
think is a pretty crazy idea.
- Everybody was pretty upset
that we hadn't caught it
during the election and it
was a very intense time.
- This is a perfect Frontline because
it's an accountability story.
The power of the big tech
firms has really gone
without tremendous
scrutiny for a long time.
(suspenseful music)
