S12 E02: DOGE, National Parks & Content Moderation: 2/23/25: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
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LastWeekTonight
John Oliver discusses Facebook’s controversial new plans for content moderation and DOGE’s continued...
Video Transcript:
[Music] know [Music] welcome welcome welcome to Last Week Tonight I'm and thank you so much for joining us it has been a busy week in Brazil Z bolsonaro was charged in an alleged coup scheme and in the US Trump told Ukraine they should never have started their war with Russia and also May time to speak to the Press On Air Force One to deliver an important message we're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there are they going you know that we're going to go into Fort Knox do you know about that that bad bump we're going to go to Fort Knox the fabled Fort Knox to make sure the gold is [Music] there allers in there we're going to be very upset okay set aside him saying that was a bad bump in the voice of the afflac duck he has alluding to a Bonkers rightwing theory that the golden Fort knock is missing though for what it's worth in Trump's first term his treasury secretary Steve minuchin actually did visit there and Freedom of Information requests you'll did this photo taken inside where you can clearly see the gold bars I know they're easy to miss given the certified smoke show standing in front of them but I promised they are there the week also saw Elon musk's Doge continuing to fire government workers something he celebrated by wielding a chainsaw at CPAC this is the Chainsaw for bureaucracy chainsaw okay first is it possible that Elon Musk the world's richest man thinks the sound of Chainsaw makes is chainsaw and second I'm not legally allowed to say what I want to happen there but I can and am thinking it really hard right now but a chainsaw might actually be a pretty apt metaphor for do given that musks cutting hastily and without a lot of precision the government's repeatedly had to scramble to rehire employees they suddenly realized were essential on Monday we learned they were trying to rehire more than 300 employees tasked with managing America's nuclear weapons then on Tuesday the USDA said accidentally fired employees who are working on theed government's response to the Aven flu outbreak there were also cuts to workers at the national parks and Forest services and at one protest a fired worker gave a warning about what these layoffs could mean when you go on vacation this summer I hope there are no forest fires cuz I and thousands of my co-workers other national park ranger and National Forest Service members won't be there to help put out the fires so good luck with that yeah it turns out Park Rangers do a lot more than just pick up litter give tours and judging by this Ranger serve looks the earrings the braids the cat eyed Sunny she looks like the Man in the Yellow Hat if he's slaved and targeting Park Service workers wasn't just shortsighted you are bullying America's best dogs they're indoor kids who love the outdoors just watch this video from the Rangers at Badlands National Park about what visitors are not allowed to touch you can't touch this can't touch this you can't touch this can't touch this that's perfect protect those dweebs at all costs can you imagine their Christmas parties just a bunch of nature lovers gifting each other Leaf of the month calendars before getting absolutely zooted on spiked Shirley temples and they are committed to that message of don't touch the wildlife even posting tweets like don't pet the fluffy cows with a followup in National Parks you don't pet bison bison pet you if you get too close and let me just say don't threaten me with a good time I'd let that broad-backed cow with Patrick Dempsey hair give me the ride of my life there is not a person Among Us who wouldn't happily get bucked and by God's biggest chunk now after massive public outcry they did reinstate some of the parks service workers showing two things one this Administration can be swayed by public pressure and two they have no idea what they're doing and nothing has driven that point home more than do's website posting receipts for their cuts and claiming their total estimated Savings of 55 billion the claim that immediately fell apart as reporters quickly found the website only accounted for 16. 6 billion of savings but even that figure turned out to be an overcount as they' mislabeled a canceled contract as being worth 8 billion instead of 8 million and when NPR eliminated other errors like contracts that hadn't actually been terminated or closed out they found the estimated savings based on the receipts do posted were closer to 2 billion which is a lot of numbers away from 55 billion in fact there hasn't been such a stark disconnect between marketing and reality since it turned out the Glasgow Wonker experience was actually this right now we are all her and that wasn't the only big claim that quickly fell apart a week ago musk tweeted out this table showing millions of people in Social Security database over the age of a 100 claiming maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security laughing emojis because because he has got an incredible sense of humor Trump then Amplified those claims at a press conference when I saw the social security numbers I said wow that's something so we have let's just go above 100 years old we have millions and millions of people over a 100 years old everybody knows that's not so people from 150 years old to 159 years old 1,345 ,000 these are in the by the way these are in the computer files these are this is what they do well they're super I asked Elon who are these Dosh people he said they're super brilliant computer people and they love the country okay he is clearly reading that for the first time because no one says wow that's really something when they know what they're talking about you say wow that's really something when your kid hands you a drawing of your family and you can't decipher where you end and your dog begins as for those brilliant computer people turns out not that brilliant because it emerged that that table came from a social security database which contains basic information on every social security number ever issued a 2023 audit did find that it contained nearly 19 million people over 100 without a recorded death but crucially the SSA itself had found almost none of them were receiving payments from the agency and they did to cost between 5 and a half and nearly $10 million to correct those errors likely far more than youd get back in any savings and that is the thing here for all of musk and Trump's bragging many of the cuts they're making are random disorganized and just plain stupid and as the real and substantial damages of this become more and more clear I'm guessing images like Elon wielding a chainsaw while dressed like the Grim Reaper on a Vegas Bender are going to spark a ton of public anger and when they find that anger directed right at them if I may borrow the words of a justifiably furious park ranger good luck with that exactly and now this and now CBS 58 Frankie Jupiter has a way with small talk where's peaches she's at home cuddling with her father but don't worry I'm still the favorite oh okay absolutely are you sure though yes you know you just kind of know when you're the dog's person I don't know how you know but you definitely just know and I've already bought her two Halloween outfits and she loves her new outfits are you sure though good morning feeling good good yeah how are you yeah I'm good good good thank you wonderful no complaints M no it's Friday the 13 is I didn't realize that yeah where's that umbrella I wish we had a black cat and a mirror to smash Frank has a mirror who whoa whoa whoa if you bought that Apple stock you wouldn't be here today that's true you'll be running your own Fortune 500 company that's also true and like that would be better yeah what does it feel like Friday though no did you ever want to be an astronaut no so what do you want today maybe want to buy yourself something nice I'm good who would we be if we were in The Beatles would I be Ringo who do you want to be I don't care that's you who you want to be who do you want to be Paul I'll who I'll take whoever's left who do you want to be I'm just I'm just here so I don't get [Music] fired moving on our main story tonight concerns technology the thing that's brought us stone tools the catapults the tamagachi and one day God willing a fourth thing worth having one of the biggest stories from the last election is just how much the tech industry seemed to swing toward Trump Elon Musk of course campaigned and jumped for him and Jeff Bezos reportedly killed the Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and got a prime seat at the inauguration alongside the CEOs of both Google and apple but one of the most visible swings came from Mark Zuckerberg he famously banned Trump from Facebook book after January 6th but last month he was co-hosting a party at his inauguration and just 2 weeks before he made this striking announcement hey everyone I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to Our Roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram oh is that what you wanted to talk about because honestly I'd much rather discuss why you suddenly look like Eddie redm was cast to play Ice Cube you look like white melmore you look like a high schooler going undercover is a different high schooler with fewer friends but I'm sorry you were talking about getting back to your roots first we're going to get rid of fact Checkers and replace them with Community notes similar to X starting in the US second we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse third we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms we used to have filters that scan stand for any policy violation now we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and for lower severity violations we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action yeah that is the CEO of meta announcing that he's getting rid of fact Checkers and saying that he doesn't want to be out of touch with mainstream discourse while wearing a $900,000 watch and there is just no way any watch is worth that much unless when you look at it it reads it's time to donate the rest of your money you officially seem to have too much the changes Zuckerberg's making are striking a leaked training document found it's now acceptable to say immigrants are grubby filthy pieces of and also specifies that this slur for Trans people is no longer a designated slur and is therefore allowed as for replacing fact Checkers with Community notes like on X it is worth noting that hasn't been a raging success over there with one study finding nearly three qus of accurate Community notes on Election misinformation never got shown to users remember that twet falsely claiming Haitians were eating pets in Springfield Ohio that claim was rated politifact's lie of the year but there is still no Community notes on the Tweet despite multiple attempts to add one and all of this is a pretty notable shift for Zuckerberg because seven years ago amid widespread public outcry around Facebook stoking misinformation and hatred he went before Congress to apologize for most of our existence we focused on all the good that connecting people can do 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 for 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 and it was my mistake and I'm sorry yeah it seems that Victorian ghost has made a pretty big turnaround since then both in terms of what he's saying and how he looks and I will admit new Zuck does look like he's having more fun he's tan he looks like he's shopping at stores that only take crypto and he's not sitting in front of Congress looking like a depressed version of the guy from the stons meme Zuckerberg is framing all of this as merely responding to a broader cultural shift some something that you outlines naturally on Joe Rogan what we do is we we try to build a platform that gives people a voice but I think that there's this wholesale generational shift in who are the people who are being listened to I think it's just like a wholeale shift and saying we just want different people who we actually trust um who who are actually going to like tell us the truth and like and not give us like the opinions that you're supposed to say but like the type of stuff that I would actually like when I'm sitting with my in my living room with my friends like the stuff that we know is true is there anything more off-putting than a guy worth hundreds of billions trying to be a relatable Everyman you know how it is chilling in the living room with the Bros cracking a six-pack of Ace of Spades magnums kicking back on your diamond encrusted sofa and turning on the big screen TV which in my house is a hollow box where I pay the cast of The Office to reenact my favorite scenes you know just relatable everyday stuff guys and look I'm not saying Facebook was doing a perfect job of moderating content until now we've criticized them multiple times before on this show I'm also not saying they even could have done it perfectly it's been said that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well but the decision to both abandon fact Checkers and turn off systems they previously claimed made the platform safer does feel like it's about to make that site a whole lot worse and the self- depiction of Zuckerberg rap named little broccoli as as someone simply embracing his company's Roots around free expression is just self-serving so given all of that tonight let's take a look at the challenges of content moderation how Facebook's face them in the past and what might have led to its new approach and let's start with the challenges because from the very beginning of the modern internet there were concerns about what was on it in 1995 Senator James exen brought a blue binder to the floor of the Senate it was full of well the most hardcore perverse types of pornography the images came from the internet exen wanted his fellow Senators to realize what kids could see come by my desk take a look at this disgusting material okay so there's a lot to love there from the binder that says warning in big letters to the invitation to come by his desk anytime for some disgusting material but my favorite part has to be the clip of a Playboy jpeg loading 1 cm at a time that is an extremely accurate portrayal of what online porn was like in the '90s how do I know no reason at all back then there were battles in both Congress and the courts about how the law should treat websites hosting things like pornography and defamatory comments for a brief time there were questions about whether a site's decision to moderate content in any way made it a publisher and therefore liable for anything that it didn't remove that ultimately led to the passage of what's known as section 230 often described as the 26 words that created the internet it stated the companies could be shielded from liability for what its users post because unlike say a print publication websites are dealing with so much material they couldn't possibly vet all of it it does have some carve out it doesn't give SES a pass for certain types of illegal content like child sexual abuse and terrorism materials but mostly it allows them to moderate without fear which is good because as Scholars will tell you content moderation is absolutely key to making the internet bearable you can't have a usable platform if you don't do some sort of content moderation otherwise every platform will just be porn and diet pills right that would be a problem especially on a website like say LinkedIn although to be honest it might already be just porn and diet pills I haven't been on it in years as I've had this job since 2014 and frankly have no interest in learning how other people rise and grind the point is though if you want people to use your site and crucially have companies want to pay to advertise on it you're going to have to make choices about what to remove and how you make those choices is always going to be contentious Facebook over the years has learned a lot of these lessons the hard way in its early days it took an almost touchingly naive approach as this former employee explains we had to set up some ground rules basic decency no nudity and no violent or hateful speech and after that we felt some reluctance to interpose our value system on this worldwide community that was growing was there not a concern then that it could come become sort of a place of just utter confusion that you have lies that are given the same weight as truths and that it kind of just becomes a place where truth becomes completely OB fiscated no we relied on what we thought were the Public's common sense and common decency to police the site oh you did did you I mean I say that was adorable but frankly I would be embarrassed to go on front line and confess that everyone working at Facebook shared a level of wide-eyed naivity that can only be described as full-blown Amelia Bedelia now obviously that initial optimism didn't last and over the years Facebook started implementing more and more rules and employing more and more people to enforce them and that could be a grim job here is one moderator describing what it was like to screen thousands of disturbing images a day with I'm going to warn you a very distracting disguise I think it would be easier to deal with the images if you weren't having to think about the so deeply I worked the evening shift so I would start at 6:00 p. m.
finish at 2: 2:00 in the morning but then you would often Wake Up 3 4 hours later you'd suddenly sit up in bed remembering the decision that you've made and realizing that you've made a mistake like I've missed a nipple you remember some image that you've seen and you suddenly realized that there was a naked girl on one side or or an Isis flag in the background so now it should have been deleted under the terrorism policy now setting aside that it's coming from a grown man with a baby head talking like Darth Vader while dressed for vacation that is a depressing glimpse into what Facebook was dealing with and it just a long way from relying on the inherent good of humanity to hiring people to Mainline Isis porn and well some decisions around blocking content were easy others turned out to be more difficult because think about it say you ban nudity what about statues what about breastfeeding what about a breastfeeding statue and before you answer what have I told you that I meant this one see it gets tricky quick the company also had to develop policies around hate speech and misinformation where the boundaries could be even trickier to Define for instance their rules prohibited attacks on people because they belong to protected categories based on things like race sex gender identity or religious affiliation but it allowed users broader latitude when they wrote about narrower subsets of those categories and watching moderators try to apply rules like that in practice can be bizarre as this hidden camera footage from a Content moderation Center in Ireland shows that ticket there walk off back to Country and it says Muslim or immigrants Muslim immigrants if it just said Muslims then you'd take this action but it doesn't says think I say all right yeah because saying that they're sing might be physical inferiority okay if it said like Muslim immigrants G for example that would be Del yeah that is a weird place to draw the line but at the same time anywhere you draw a line can be weird deciding where speech becomes harmful is like trying to figure out which of the horrifying Nightmares on an Animorphs cover you wouldn't run over with your car these freaks no question it's on site I'll bounce them off the front bumper of my Subaru going 80 and feel nothing on the other end though whoo whoa whoo that's a normal kid slow down I'm not trying to do time but in the middle yeah that's a question isn't it that that's a question and the thing is the same goes with factchecking obvious lies are one thing but there are plenty of statements that are factually true but still technically misleading and at one time Facebook put a lot of thought into this even producing this video in 2018 featuring a bunch of employees wrestling with the nuances of moderation and one even diagramming out the problem as he saw it imagine on the x-axis that you have the amount of Truth in a piece of content not on the axis you have the intent to mislead you can take this chart and you can split it into four quadrants right on the bottom left you have the set of things that are low truth but nobody was intending to mislead anything that's just called being wrong on the internet and it happens and in the bottom right you know it's the set of things that have high truth but again nobody was trying to mislead anyone that's just called being right on the internet and I'm sure it'll happen someday the top right this is things that are high truth High intent to mislead so this is stuff like propaganda this is stuff like cherry picking of Statistics now mind you we have to be really careful here right because of our commitment to free speech everything we do here has to be incredibly incredibly careful but then we move to this quadrant this is like the really dangerous quadrant right low amount of Truth High intent to mislead these are things that were explicitly designed and architected to be viral these are the hoaxes of the world these are things like pizza gate this is just false news we have to get this right if we're going to regain people's trust you know it is amazing that all this started when a young man had a simple dream of ranking his classmates by ability and 15 years later a company struggling to stop people from accusing random peteras of human trafficking a butterfly masturbates in its storm room and it causes a hurricane for the rest of us and to give that man credit he's genuinely wrestling with the issue there but the company wasn't doing that out of the goodness of its heart Facebook had come under heavy fire for allowing fake news and hate speech to proliferate not just in the US but also abroad we've aled before about how misinformation on Facebook helped fuel ethnic hatred leading to headlines like Facebook admits it was used to incite violence in Myanmar it was around this time that Zuckerberg apologized to Congress and the company began deploying an array of options to handle misinformation from partnering with outside fact Checkers to appending notes to posts it would also delete some posts or limit the reach of others and in doing so it found itself constantly making very hard decisions under pressure from some very powerful people here one such case and and a former Facebook employee explaining the decision they ended up making we want to give this President the opportunity to do something historic this was the video of then house Speaker Pelosi posted to Facebook in 2019 slowed down to make it seem that she was slurring her words did it come down it did not why because it didn't violate the policies that they had so did she put pressure on the company to take it down she was definitely not pleased she definitely wanted the company yes and it really damaged the relationship that the company had with her okay s aside the fact that I don't see why you need to slow down footage to embarrass Nancy Pelosi a person who says plenty of embarrassing things at normal speed I do kind of agree with Facebook there that does this piss off Nancy Pelosi isn't a valid metric for taking that particular video down and look I'm not saying Facebook made the right decision 100% of the time again no company operating at this scale could but it did develop systems that it claimed worked pretty well at one point they bragged that when people saw fact Checkers had labeled content false or partially false they would not click on it nearly 95% of the time and in a recent report they noted that when it comes to hate speech they take an action against their systems automatically dealt with 95. 3% of it meaning users only had to report the rest now of course some of those tools are being watered down and others are being turned off completely and that brings us to the question of why why are they suddenly doing this well there are a few things that happened during the past 5 years that have helped bring us to this point one has been conservatives repeatedly painting normal content moderation as political persecution big Tech's out to get conservatives that's not a suspicion that's not a hunch that's a fact we've seen these uh these big Tech has been censoring us the American people are being censored conservatives are being censored uh the information that's flowing uh to the American people uh is being censored it's just the bottom line okay that is obviously old but to be fair Devon Nunes knows a thing or two about censorship given he once filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter accounts that made fun of him including one that pretended to be nunes's cow he sued a fake Twitter cow because it said mean things about him prompting the ACLU to issue this actual statement headlined Devon nunes's cow has a First Amendment right to call Representative Nunes a treasonous cowpoke we truly live in the single stupidest timeline the point is conservatives have been crying censorship for years but the evidence for that is very weak first to the extent their posts do get flagged more that's probably because conservatives tend to be more likely to spread political information according to numerous empirical studies but even if you think platforms are trying to suppress conservatives they're doing a terrible job of that given many of Facebook's top performers lean right and there are three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers as liberal ones on the site nevertheless Republicans conducted an allout assault on the idea of content moderation often citing one go-to example outlined here by Janine Piro who suppressed free speech in the 2020 election Facebook when they wouldn't allow people to communicate and the press to communicate on Hunter Biden's laptop right Hunter Biden's laptop a story that big Tech successfully centered which is why you've never heard about it and I'm afraid it is worth taking a second to remind you of the details in this story because while people's minds might immediately swing to Russian hoax or damning evidence of Biden corruption the truth is it was neither very briefly back in 2020 while Trump was President social media sites got a warning from the FBI to look out for hack and leak operations before the election then in October the New York Post ran a story based on files from a laptop they claimed belonged to Hunter Biden which had been given to them by Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani Facebook and Twitter were wary of the story Twitter briefly didn't allow people to post links to it and Facebook allowed the story to be seen and shared but limited the article's reach only to remove that restriction soon after now it eventually came out that files from the laptop were legit but also that nothing on it revealed illegal or unethical Behavior by Joe Biden so was initially suppressing the laptop story a up by these companies in hindsight yeah was the story itself particularly revelatory or important not really did Facebook's actions prevent people from finding out about it before the election again not really even during the period Facebook was limiting its spread the story got 54 million views on its site so if this was an attempt at censorship it was successful in limiting the audience to around the same number of people that watched the Friends finale but that initial decision meant Mark Zuckerberg got yelled at a lot by the right and around that same time he was also being yelled at by Biden's white house because as the covid vaccine was rolling out a lot of misinformation was circulating on Facebook Biden himself said at one point of Facebook that they're killing people and while he quickly walked that back to hear Zuckerberg tell it the pressure from the White House to suppress anything critical of vaccines back then was overwhelming I mean basically these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse I mean Biden when he was he gave some statement at some point I don't know if it was a press conference or to some journalist where he basically was like these guys are killing people and and um and I don't know then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started inves ating coming after our company it was it was brutal it was brutal okay he is clearly pandering to Joe Rogan and his audience there although many seem too distracted by his outfit for that to work well given comments under that video include bro dress like undercover cop I thought this was Little Dicky and why is a 40-year-old billionaire dressed like my 25y old shrooms guy but but let's deal with his implicit claim that the government launched investigations to punish Facebook for hosting anti-vaccine content it is true that the governments investigated Facebook a lot in recent years but none of those investigations fit Zuckerberg's narrative some like an FTC antitrust lawsuit were launched during the first Trump Administration others like the cfpb's investigation of big Tech Payment Systems involveed multiple other companies and much of the scrutiny the companies received in recent years was actually the result of a whistleblower releasing a cach of documents known as the Facebook files as's complaint the government was cursing and screaming at Facebook they are allowed to do that when when we call up government agencies to check a fact they can tell us to eat because cursing does not violate your rights for more than that check out the Constitution for total dumb asses what they can't do is force you to do something and in that interview Zuckerberg describes his response to government demands back then as I was just like well we're not going to do that and exactly you said no as was your right and don't take my word for this allegations like these have been adjudicated in court when two Republican state AGS tried suing the government claiming it pressured platforms including Facebook to censor their speech they lost in a 63 Supreme Court decision written by Amy Cony Barrett who noted the plaintes could not demonstrate that their content was restricted due to government pressure and look I can understand Zuckerberg's feelings being hurt by the president saying his company's killing people and and I can understand him being sick of being yelled at by Republicans for doing too much and by democrats for doing too little on some level I can even understand a business wanting to Cozy up to whoever's in the white house but there is one other Factor here that does seem relevant to this discussion and feels important to mention it's a political Evolution for meta for years after Facebook suspended MrTrump's account in the wake of January 6th and just months after the president-elect accused Zuckerberg of plotting against him in 2020 calling for life in prison if Zuckerberg did it again but after MrTrump's win Zuckerberg traveled to Mar Lago his company donated a million dollars to the Trump inaugural fund and now close Trump Ally and UFC head Dana White is joining meta's board meta Facebook I think they've come a long way do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past yeah yeah probably Trump threatened Mark Zuckerberg with life in prison then Zuckerberg turned around gave him money hired one of his buddies and changed the direction his company was going it doesn't take a genius to draw a conclusion there and in fact it didn't take one and and it didn't stop there meta also recently paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit that Trump filed over being kicked off Facebook despite many experts agreeing that was well within the company's rights and at this point it does begin to feel like Trump is doing exactly what Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration of leveraging the power of his office to pressure social media companies to to bend to his will and Zuckerberg seems to be complying and he'll insist these changes are not a result of being under political pressure but either way Facebook sure seems Now set to become an absolute sewer of hatred and misinformation which I know sounds like a pretty good description on Facebook already but we're about to see what happens when they really stop trying so what can we do well there are some bad ideas out there both Democrats and Republicans have in recent years suggested ways to amend section 23 so companies are more liable for what appears on websites but I am yet to see a proposal that couldn't be easily weaponized to enable political censorship there are definitely options available to companies that advertise on Facebook and I would argue they might want to seriously consider whether they want their ads next to these actual sample sentences Facebook says are now acceptable hey Disney you want Olaf promoting Frozen 3 next to that I don't know maybe you do but for individuals the options here are more limited you could delete your meta accounts and you would not be alone in doing that in January Google searches for how to cancel and delete Facebook Instagram and Fred's accounts increased by over 5,000% and there are alternatives out there that don't seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump but I do get that if Facebook and Instagram are where your family and friends are you may not be ready to take that step just remember to take whatever you read on those platforms with even more of a grain of salt than you did before but there is one small way you can actually with metan and that is by making yourselves a bit less valuable to them remember advertising makes up 98% of meta's Revenue and a key component is them being able to offer companies the ability to microt Target you meta can do that because they track massive amounts of data about not just what you do on their sites but all across the internet which is why they probably would not want me to tell you that you can change your settings so that Facebook and Instagram cannot profit as much from your data anymore if you'd be interested in the step-by-step guide on how to do that simply visit John Oliver wantsyou era.