zuckerberg 2

NO MERRI

follows musk on disinfo 1 15 wanna be fed contractor

see pluto 4 BROLIARCHY

see tax dodge

1019

1119 format messed up

see main previous facebook/zuck

see FACEBOOK 4 META(3 code problem)

see instagram

see social medias bias BS

see zuck chan fdn ZUCKERBUCKS bs

execute traitor ivan Raiklin trump threat to jail for life?!

went on tour to meet lil real ppl, staff predictable disaster; peril of isolation?

Meta

The parent company of Facebook agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed over the suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Before the election, Mr. Trump had threatened to imprison the company’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

:{---

BOSSIE BS DOCU

IMDB 3 26 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1733113/

Producer

Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump (2022)

Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump

4.9

Video

producer (as David N. Bossie)

2022

an 4 25

Analysts accuse big U.S. tech firms of paying almost $278 billion less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for U.S. companies making the same profits.

The Guardian reveals Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft —the “Silicon Six”— generated a combined $11 trillion in revenue and $2.5 trillion in profits over the last decade. But they paid an average of just 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the U.S., according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF).

“Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures,” Fair Tax Foundation Chief Executive Paul Monaghan told The Guardian. “The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

READ MORE:'Don't you see what's happening?' Experts call Trump's latest move 'full blown fascism'

Analysis at FTF also discovered the companies had inflated their stated tax payments by $82 billion over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay. Monaghan added that these companies have "enormous political influence as well as economic power," in that they all spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying government officials on key tax-writing committees to have more say in how the tax system works.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

The Guardian reports that Netflix had the lowest rate of tax actually paid compared to profit at 14.7%, while Microsoft paid 20.4%. Amazon, meanwhile, had the worst tax conduct based on factors such as the total amount of tax paid, much if it through “obvious profit shifting” such as booking a sizeable portion of its U.K. income in low-tax Luxembourg. But Amazon’s corporate tax rate was still 19.6% ahead of Netflix and Meta (15.4%) and Apple (18.4%).

The report comes as leaders of many of these same tech companies’ influence genuflect to President Donald Trump. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg all attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Read the full Guardian story at this link.

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triple win?

suck up lowers threat, raises gov’t contract, lowers cost

note basis in soc media bias BS

gubmint made us, inefficient dereg

vaxx?!

mma 1 25

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan go on right-wing media tour, promoting policy rollbacks and currying favor with Trump

Zuckerberg and Kaplan both took to conservative outlets to blast Biden’s tech regulations, complain about so-called “censorship,” and praise Trump

Written by Jack Wheatley

Research contributions from Noah Dowe

Published 01/16/25 mma

Following Meta’s announcement of significant policy rollbacks — which include “scrapping” fact-checking in the U.S. “entirely” and loosening content moderation — the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and the company’s new chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, have been making the rounds in right-wing media.

During these right-wing media appearances, which come ahead of Trump’s return to the White House, Zuckerberg and Kaplan praised Trump as “a real opportunity for us to push forward on free expression everywhere around the world” and complained about previous content moderation policies, saying they were “too restrictive,” likening them to “censorship,” and placing the blame on a supposed “heavy-handed” Biden “regime.”

Meta capitulates to false right-wing claims of censorship and rolls back content moderation policies

• • On January 7, Meta announced significant changes to its existing content moderation policies across all of its platforms — eliminating third-party fact-checking and removing several crucial content moderation policies. Instead of third-party fact checkers, Meta said it would move toward a system of community notes, shifting responsibility for reining in misinformation on its platforms away from the company. In his video announcement, Zuckerberg justified the changes by claiming that “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” Meta, [1/7/25; Media Matters, 1/7/25]

* Notably, both the substance of Meta’s new policy changes and the messaging behind their rollout signal a direct appeal to the incoming Trump administration and MAGA media. For years, conservative media personalities have painted themselves as defenders of free speech while falsely claiming that social media companies were censoring their views. Media Matters and others have repeatedly debunked these claims. Media Matters, [1/7/25]

• • Following the announcement, Meta began making significant content moderation changes. These changes included replacing the term “Hate Speech” in its community standards with “Hateful Conduct,” and allowing posts referring to transgender people as “it,” comparing women to “household objects,” and alleging “mental illness … based on gender or sexual orientation.” Notably, Meta allowed a variety of previously restricted content which dehumanizes women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants, among others. Meta, accessed [1/15/25; The Verge, 1/7/25]

• • To roll out the policy changes, Kaplan — who is a former GOP political operative — gave an exclusive interview onFox & Friends. Zuckerberg’s announcement video was also reportedly first shared with Fox News. The New York Times, [1/2/25; CNN, 1/7/25; The Washington Post, 2/20/20; Media Matters, 9/9/20]

• • After his Fox News appearance, Kaplan also joined conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s show, and Zuckerberg appeared as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Salem Radio Network, *The Hugh Hewitt Show*,[; YouTube, The Joe Rogan Experience,]

* ## Joel Kaplan gave an exclusive interview to Fox, detailing policy changes and emphasizing how Meta wants to “work with President Trump”

• • On the January 7 episode ofFox & Friends, Kaplan discussed Meta’s policy changes, calling them “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression” and “getting back to our roots and free expression.” Kaplan immediately noted Meta’s decision to eliminate third-party fact-checking, claiming there has “just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check and how, so we’re just scrapping it entirely.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/7/25]

• • Additionally, Kaplan called the previous content moderation policies — which included the company's hate speech policy — “too restrictive,” and adopted right-wing rhetoric by comparing standards designed to protect vulnerable groups to “censorship.” He stated that “people want to discuss and debate” things like “immigration, trans issues, gender,” and also claimed, “We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you can say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship. So we’re changing those rules.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/7/25]

• • Kaplan praised the incoming Trump administration, calling them “big defenders of free expression” and contrasting them to so-called “societal and political pressure” for “more content moderation, more censorship” over the last 4 years. Kaplan: “We’ve got a real opportunity now. We’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression and that makes a difference.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/7/25]

• • He went on to complain about pressure from governments abroad and promised, “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.” Kaplan: “One of the things that we experienced, is that when you have a U.S. president administration that’s pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/7/25]

• • Kaplan said Trump is “really focused on making sure that we maintain U.S. competitiveness and leadership on technology, things like AI,” describing them as “obviously super important to our company and our industry and we’ll look forward to working with the new administration to advance those goals.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/7/25]

• ## Kaplan also went on Hugh Hewitt’s show, attacking Biden and fawning over Trump

• • On January 8 — the day after Meta’s announcement — Kaplan appeared on conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s show to promote the changes to Meta policies, saying that “people are ready for a return to the values of free expression.” [Salem Radio Network, The Hugh Hewitt Show, 1/8/25]

• • As he did in his appearance on Fox News, Kaplan described Meta’s third-party fact-checking system as “too politically biased.” Salem Radio Network, *The Hugh Hewitt Show*, [1/8/25]

• • Kaplan said that Meta was “looking forward to … working with President Trump” to fight regulation of Meta abroad, complaining that other countries have “taken a much more aggressive approach through regulation to censorship online.” He went on to describe it as “a real opportunity for us to push forward on free expression everywhere around the world.” Salem Radio Network, *The Hugh Hewitt Show*, [1/8/25]

• • Lambasting the Biden administration’s regulation of social media companies, Kaplan called the administration a “heavy-handed regime.” He described the administration’s rules as “a real hindrance to growth” and said that tech companies should “be very optimistic that we're gonna come out from under this really heavy-handed regime that we've had over the last 4 years of just regulation across the board.” Salem Radio Network, *The Hugh Hewitt Show*, [1/8/25]

• ## Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, complaining about the Biden administration's supposed pressure and claiming Trump will defend Meta from EU regulations

• • In the January 10 appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg claimed that Biden’s administration has pressured Meta to remove claims about vaccine side effects that “honestly were true.”Zuckerberg: “They pushed us super hard.” YouTube, *The Joe Rogan Experience*, [1/10/25]

• • Praising Trump, Zuckerberg suggested, like Kaplan, that he’s “optimistic” that the incoming administration would shield tech companies from fines imposed by the European Union. Zuckerberg claimed that “the EU is basically, and all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want,” and added that “to some degree, if the U.S. tech industry is going to continue being really strong, I do think that the U.S. government has a role in, in basically defending it abroad. And that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will happen in this administration.” YouTube, *The Joe Rogan Experience*, [1/10/25]

• • Zuckerberg claimed Trump “just wants America to win.” YouTube, *The Joe Rogan Experience*, [1/10/25]

• • While discussing his decision to add UFC CEO Dana White to Meta's board of directors, Zuckerberg praised White’s efforts to rebuild the UFC, and said he wants to utilize that strategy for Meta. He said that “we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company, and, like, we need some, like, strong people who are gonna basically, you know, help advise us on how to handle some of these situations.” YouTube, *The Joe Rogan Experience*, [1/10/25]

• • Referencing competition from foreign governments on AI production, Zuckerberg complained about government oversight into Meta, and said “you could get a lot more done if the government were helping American companies rather than kind of slowing you down at every step along the way.” He went on to add that “it's easy for the government to take for granted that the U.S. will lead on all these things when I think it's a very close competition,” and that he would like the government to “be a force that's helping us to do these things.” YouTube, *The Joe Rogan Experience*, [1/10/25]

//

1. ### Zuckerberg and Meta are done pretending to care about mitigating the harms their platforms cause

01/07/25 6:32 PM EST

2. ### Media billionaires are cozying up to Trump as Meta slashes its content moderation policy

01/09/25 8:56 AM EST

Hate speech and misinformation proliferate on Meta products, with 13,500 policy violations documented in the past year alone](https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/hate-speech-and-misinformation-proliferate-meta-products-13500-policy-violations)}:

05/17/22

===

===

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AN 1 25

In what was billed as his “farewell address,” President Biden yesterday warned America that the nation is succumbing to an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy, and the “dangerous concentration of power” they pose to democratic ideals:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

He’s right, of course.

Fascism startswith the Trump derriere-kissing we’re now witnessing by the wealthiest people in America, who own the biggest megaphones and thereby determine what information Americans get. What they get back from Trump is raw power to do whatever they want.

Elon Musk — the richest person in the world— controls X, which under his leadership has become a cesspool of lies and bigotry.

Musk has posted or replied to more than 80 posts about the Los Angeles fires, many of which downplayed the role of climate change — placing blame instead on individual female firefighters of color and lesbian firefighters, including posting their names and faces.

He boosted an hour-long propaganda video by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that claimed the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot” to cause the collapse of the United States; Musk replied simply, “True.”

He repeatedly amplified claims that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs cost lives by wasting money that could have been spent on disaster response, suggesting that the destruction could have been mitigated if more white men had been retained.

Musk has made it clear that his platform’s main role during the upcoming Trump regime will be to back whatever Trump chooses to do and criticize Trump’s critics with more lies and bigotry.

Jeff Bezos — the second-richest person in America — owns Amazon. His Prime Video just announced it will spend a whopping $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump, for which she is an executive producer, and stream it on Amazon Prime.

What else will Amazon promote or censor, to curry favor with Trump?

Bezos also owns The Washington Post. Just before the election, he killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris. Earlier this month, a Postcartoonist quit after the newspaper spiked a cartoon showing Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg kneeling before Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg — the third-richest person in America —owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. He’s sucking up to Trump by ridding his platforms of content moderation so that they, too, can amplify Trump’s lies and bigotry.

Announcing the end of fact-checking on his platforms, Zuckerberg says he thinks it will “take another ten years” of fact-free operation before Meta is “back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn’t messed that up in the first place.”

Zuckerberg says the deciding factor was the “cultural tipping point” of Trump’s election.

Not only will Zuckerberg fire most of the 40,000 fact-checkers who have screened his platforms’ posts for accuracy, but he will be moving the few who remain from California to Texas, “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”

So Texas workers will be less “biased” than California workers? As Dan Evon of the nonprofit News Literacy Project notes, the move “provides an air of legitimacy to a popular disinformation narrative: that fact-checking is politically biased.”

Training materials for Meta’s remaining trust and safety workers include examples of speech that Zuckerberg now wants permitted:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

Trump praised the move, saying “I think they’ve come a long way.”

A reporter asked Trump if his threats to put Zuckerberg in prison caused the change in policy. “Probably,” Trump responded. Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Meta played a role as well?

Zuckerberg has also promoted prominent Republican Joel Kaplan to be Meta’s chief global affairs officer and put Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Trump, on its board.

My friends, none of this has anything to do with freedom of speech. It has everything to do with the power of money.

The three richest Americans want to decide what the rest of us will know about the coming Trump regime.

Concentrated wealth is the enemy of democracy. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”

As we slouch into the darkness of Trump II, America needs people and institutions that speak truth to power, not align themselves with it.

When we the people regain power, three reforms are critically necessary to begin to tame the oligarchy:

1. X, Amazon, Meta, and other giant tech media platforms must either be busted up or treated as public utilities, responsible to the public.
2. Hugely wealthy individuals must not be permitted to own critical media.
3. Large accumulations of individual wealth must be taxed.

My friends, we will prevail.

---

4. ### On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains that Zuckerberg capitulating to MAGA is the culmination of “the right wing working the refs” with false claims of conservative censorship

mma 1 25

January 11, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Ayman

AYMAN MOHYELDIN (HOST): So that was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arguing that when the U.S. government targets or attacks tech companies, it sets a dangerous precedent. And it seems kind of rich coming from Mark Zuckerberg because you know it was Zuck that Donald Trump literally threatened to throw in prison for the rest of his life if he did anything illegal to influence the presidential election. And this week, Trump even gloated that Zuckerberg rolled back his fact-checking program because he scared him into it. And with that capitulation, Zuck seems to have completed his full transformation from tech bro to MAGA world. The transformation includes bulking up, abandoning his hoodie for an oversized black tee, and of course a little bling around his neck. And to be honest, the signs have been there for a while. This was not an overnight transformation.

...

Angelo, your take on this full transformation by Zuckerberg? I mean, it's — We can joke around a little bit, but it carries some serious and dangerous weight for a lot in this country.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, it really does, for a lot of reasons. I mean, this isn't surprising. I mean, he's done this before. Let's not forget that back in 2016, you know, after Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham did this meeting with him in May of 2016, he radically overhauled Facebook's policies around the trending topics section and right-wing misinformation and content exploded. There's been this idea, at least that sort of metastasized, that somehow Facebook has been suppressing or censoring conservative content. It's just the right wing working the refs. I mean, we did a big study that looked at 29 million posts. Right-wing content had 42% of the engagements, even though it only accounted for 19% of the content. I mean, that's not what suppression and censorship looks like.

But part of what we're seeing is the culmination of a strategy of working the refs and doing two things. You threaten them and bully them. In this case, you know, Zuckerberg not only got threatened to be jailed, but then in November, right after Trump won the election, the guy that's going to be the new FCC chair sent a letter saying, “Hey, we're going to come after your Section 230 immunity protections unless you stop censoring.” So one was to avoid consequences, and then the second part, which is even scarier — and this is going to be the new norm — is that you could also get something out of it.

And that's what Zuckerberg saw, is that if you don't just say nice things to Trump, but you actually start to take what you have, which is his ecosystem, and use it to empower MAGA and the megaphone that we were just talking about in the first segment, you can get something out of it. And what he wants is less accountability from other countries that are actually cracking down on the types of misinformation, disinformation, extremism, sort of surveillance, you know, advertising that the platform is doing, and they're trying to rein it in. And what he wants is protection.

So he wants to basically exploit the government to protect and further enrich himself. And if he has to give up the platform, then so be it. And, you know, to me, it's not just about fact-checking. The part that's scarier — and that's where I'll stop — is that he said, “We're not only not going to fact check, but we're also going to open up the floodgates” —

MOHYELDIN: Yeah.

CARUSONE: Where what they had previously been doing was slowing down the types of content that would otherwise, you know, that lead to misinformation. Now they're saying, “Hey, that's a free for all now.” It's all going to get supercharged, so we're in for trouble.

'Where's the leadership?' Author slams Zuckerberg over ending Meta's fact-checking program

scott galloway

broligarchy

:{}:

Jan 7, 2025 #JeffBezos #MarkZuckerberg #ElonMusk

90,929 views • Jan 7, 2025 • #JeffBezos #MarkZuckerberg #ElonMusk

“It's chilling in its own way,” says Chris Hayes on tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook currying favor with Trump. “But also it's very clarifying to have them all standing on the same side.”

---

'Where's the leadership?' Author slams Zuckerberg over ending Meta's fact-checking program

AN 1 25

alternet

Trump's mysterious relationship with Zuckerberg — and the real reason behind Meta's shift

Thom Hartmann January 09, 2025

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (wearing a $900,000 watch) announced yesterday morning that across their over-7-billion-user-strong social media empire — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — they’ll be dialing back on fact-checking. They’re also preparing to promote more “political” content (among other changes that support those two moves, like no longer filtering out trash-talking women, queer people, or immigrants, and moving what’s left of their Trust & Safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas).

Here’s the problem: Republican politicians rely on lies, distortions, and falsehoods to sell most of their policies and candidates.

They must do this because the reality of their actual goals (cut billionaire taxes, increase pollution, gut worker and consumer protections, defund schools and medical care, privatize and cut Social Security and Medicare, subsidize oil companies, outlaw abortion, etc.) are so repellent to most Americans.

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has been shockingly scrupulous for decades about telling the truth, at least with regard to policy. The last “big lie” I can remember coming from the Dems was LBJ’s claiming that North Vietnam had attacked us at the Gulf of Tonkin. And that was 60 years ago!

Seriously, can you think of any major Democratic Party lies in the past few decades that Democratic politicians repeated regularly on cable TV shows, op-eds, and in campaign commercials? Particularly, lies about important public policy debates and the structure of our government and its programs?

I did a search for “Democratic lies” using 2 different AI programs, Google, and DuckDuckGo. The worst I could find — none of which are consequential or even real, actual, or oft-repeated lies — were, according to those search sites:

— Only the rich will pay more taxes under proposed policies.

— A transition to green energy won’t cost any jobs.

— Sanctuary cities reduce crime rates universally.

— Social media platforms primarily suppress left-wing voices.

— Trump’s Project 2025 wasn’t actually Trump’s project.

— Expanding federal funding for education guarantees improved student outcomes.

— Kamala Harris falsely claimed Trump encouraged Putin to invade U.S. allies.

— Harris mischaracterized a border security bill as the "strongest in decades."

— Tim Walz falsely attributed a quote about ruthless use of power to JD Vance.

— Illinois Governor JB Pritzker misleadingly claimed Trump told people to drink bleach for COVID-19.

— Electric vehicles are affordable and practical for all Americans, regardless of income or location.

On the other hand, those same sources handed me this (partial) list of actual and destructive-to-democracy-and-society lies that are regularly told and promoted by Republicans in pretty much every venue and show up every Sunday on the political shows:

— The 2020 election was stolen.

— Global warming isn’t real or important.

— Giving tax cuts to billionaires helps average working people.

— Biden “opened” our southern border for four years.

— Democrats encourage illegal immigrants to vote.

— Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that’s going broke and can only be fixed by cutting benefits or privatization.

— A national healthcare system like every other advanced democracy in the world has won’t work in America.

— Free or inexpensive college doesn’t benefit the nation, but student debt builds “individual responsibility.”

— The Democratic Party is filled with sexual monsters and child predators who drink blood.

— Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and Afghanistan was responsible for 9/11.

— The United States was founded as a Christian nation, and the Founding Fathers intended it to be governed by biblical law.

— Critical Race Theory is being taught in elementary schools to make white children feel guilty.

— Cutting corporate taxes leads to higher wages for workers.

— Climate change policies are an attack on the economy and personal freedom.

— Gun control laws lead to higher crime rates.

— Wind and solar energy are unreliable and will destroy the energy grid.

— LGBTQ+ rights threaten religious freedom and the safety of children.

— Voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States.

— Democrats want to abolish the police and create lawless “anarchy zones.”

— Universal basic income or expanded welfare programs discourage hard work.

— Raising the minimum wage will destroy small businesses and increase unemployment.

— Public schools are indoctrinating children with Marxist and homosexual ideologies.

— The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) caused massive job losses and economic ruin.

— Immigration is the primary cause of crime and drug trafficking in the U.S.

— The January 6th insurrection was a peaceful protest.

— Unions are corrupt and hurt workers more than they help.

— Democrats are pushing to remove God and religion from American society.

— The mainstream media is entirely biased and acts as a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party.

— Raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt small businesses and destroy the economy.

— Abortion is murder, and Democrats support killing babies even after birth.

— Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable and should be privatized.

— America’s biggest national security threat is China, not climate change.

— Universal background checks for gun purchases are a slippery slope to gun confiscation.

— The U.S. military is being weakened by “woke” policies and diversity initiatives.

— Public health measures during pandemics, like masks and vaccines, are a government overreach and an attack on personal freedom.

— The Green New Deal will eliminate cows, airplanes, and American jobs.

— The COVID-19 vaccine is part of a government tracking or depopulation program.

— Teachers’ unions are destroying education by prioritizing their own interests over students.

— Democrats want to eliminate suburbs through urban housing policies.

— Cutting capital gains taxes helps working Americans and stimulates the economy.

— The U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, and any changes would make it worse.

— Climate scientists are exaggerating or fabricating evidence to get government funding.

— Most Americans support banning books and other restrictions on teaching controversial topics.

— Homelessness is caused by laziness and bad personal choices, not systemic issues like housing costs and investment operations.

— DEI, Affirmative Action, and similar programs are a form of “reverse racism” that discriminates against white people.

— Black immigrants eat white people’s dogs and cats.

— January 6th was an inside FBI operation, a Democratic Party Antifa operation, or both.

These lies have political potency and have often altered election outcomes. Many or even most are frequently promoted by Republican politicians at every opportunity. Many are at the foundation of GOP political campaigns.

Zuckerberg, the country’s richest millennial (with an estimated 1/50th of all American millennial’s wealth in his own money bin), recently made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ass and hand him a $1 million check.

Yesterday, Trump bragged that Zuck did this because he was frightened by Trump’s explicit and written threat to put him in prison for the “rest of his life.” He essentially bragged, “I’m alpha, Zuck is beta.”

Zuckerberg also put one of Trump’s closest personal buds, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana White, on Meta’s board of directors, where White can keep an eye on the CEO for Trump.

Finally, Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for George W. Bush, to Chief Global Affairs Officer. Kaplan then went on Fox and bragged that they were making the changes because Trump is coming into the White House:

“We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”

Right.

One hand washes the other. Meta is fighting the federal government right now, which wants to break up its alleged monopoly. Trump’s friends Putin and the rightwing death squad militias forming in America — when their most violent members are let out of prison with a pardon — can now have free rein to dominate, recruit, and terrorize on social media, much like they did before.

Most important, though, in a nation where one political party routinely uses lies and distortions but the other is generally committed to telling the truth, who benefits when the “free expression” of political lies is dramatically boosted?

(And none of this even begins to explore the political bias of the algorithms used by Meta and X to promote rage-producing content to users…because those algorithms are secret.)

Meta and X could prioritize telling the truth and stopping — or at least identifying — naked political lies to help stabilize America’s political system and society. Instead, it appears that the 54% of Americans who get all or most of their news from social media are now about to get drenched in a hurricane of Republican lies and misinformation.

This is not without consequences for our nation and the world.

The removal of fact-checkers and subsequent increase in false online information, which we’ve already seen on other platforms, erodes truth and accountability in public discourse, creates fertile ground for authoritarian politicians, undermines democratic processes, and fuels societal polarization.

It’s exactly what Vladimir Putin wants for America and has paid millions for trolls to produce for years, which is why it’s no surprise that Donald Trump would threaten Mark Zuckerberg to make it happen.

Without a shared baseline of truth, meaningful public debate becomes impossible. People retreat into echo chambers, making collective problem-solving a relic of the past and turning governance into a tool for manipulation rather than representation.

Ultimately, this path leads to a dystopia where truth becomes irrelevant, power dictates reality, and the fundamental principles of democracy — accountability, transparency, and representation — are destroyed.

The proof that we’re already a far ways down this road is that — by substantial margins — voters who got their news and political/current events information from traditional sources like major newspapers and the mainstream TV networks (that still fact-check) voted for Harris, while those who got most of their news from social media primarily voted for Trump.

Republican strategists know this and are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Meta following X’s path.

But the worst of it is that virtually all of the Democratic “lies” aren’t really lies; they’re usually disjointed attempts to push policies (like raising taxes on the rich or Medicare For All) that ultimately benefit average Americans.

On the other side, though, virtually all of the Republican “lies” are actual lies or major distortions designed to either inflame bigoted passions or conceal the real goal of what they’re doing in the background (typically to make the morbidly rich even richer).

For example, as the press is focused on Trump‘s Greenland rants, Republicans in Congress are preparing a massive multi-trillion-dollar tax cut (that will fuel inflation and further impoverish working-class people) for billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump.

The old sleight-of-hand begins anew, with social media ready to put it on steroids.

Using massive amounts of naked lies as a political strategy is relatively new in America, having started with Reagan promising that trickle down would increase prosperity and gone into hyperdrive with Trump’s first lie-filled term.

By killing off or even reducing meaningful fact-checking, Zuckerberg, like Musk before him, is handing a loaded gun to a GOP ready and willing to use it, while Democrats are left with, at best, slingshots that they really don’t even want to use (and aren’t particularly good at).

And you can bet your bottom dollar that billionaires Trump, Zuckerberg, Putin, and Musk know it.

Zuckerberg Goes “Full MAGA” as Meta Ends Fact-Checking in U.S. & Paves Way for More Hate Speech | **Democracy Now!

...three guests.

In Manila, Philippines, we’re joined by Maria Ressa, founder, CEO and executive editor of the Philippine independent news site Rappler. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work defending free expression in the Philippines. Her book is titled How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. He’s professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. His piece for The Guardian, just out, “Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga.”

...

and in Doha, we’re joined by Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar and an expert on disinformation. He’s the author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media.

Let’s begin with you, Professor Jones. Digital authoritarianism. Can you talk about how Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement, soon after he met with Donald Trump and is giving well over a million dollars to the inauguration and put one of his closest allies — Trump’s allies, that is — on his board, fits into that concept and what it means, digital authoritarianism?

MARC OWEN JONES: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.

I mean, digital authoritarianism, broadly speaking, is the use of digital technology for authoritarian ends. You know, it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. And I think Zuckerberg’s move is indicative of the authoritarian direction that the United States is going. He is essentially saying that the social media company of Meta is subservient to the whims of the political elite.

And I think a key part of digital authoritarianism here that’s really important is this notion of the post-truth. Authoritarianism thrives on the absence of facts. It thrives on a war on reality. Why is that the case? Well, because authoritarian leaders, they want — they’re not interested in the truth, because the truth can be used to attack them, to discredit them, as we know that Trump is — was documented as being one of the most lying presidents and politicians in history. But they want an alternative reality, alternative facts. And the idea of a war on fact-checkers really fits in with this, because what it means is that authoritarian leaders, they want people to respect them, they want people fear them. They fundamentally want people to see the world through their eyes and be submissive to their wishes. And I think that’s what this represents, is that Mark Zuckerberg is clearly bending the knee to Trump, not only doing his bidding, but also creating this massive donation.

And I think what we need to understand about digital authoritarianism is that we are in a space where we increasingly communicate in digital technologies. Zuckerberg’s move is designed not just to, quote-unquote, “prevent censorship.” Here, “censorship” is a euphemism for, actually, harm against minorities.

Some of the examples you mentioned were women, but also transgender people. But also immigrants were mentioned by Zuckerberg himself. These are all right-wing dog whistles. Essentially, what this means it’s going to be, it’s open season on these digital platforms for people to attack minorities and to harm them. It’s not about reducing censorship. It’s actually about increasing digital violence against minorities, which is part of the new, I would say, increasingly autocratic America.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Maria Ressa, can we get your response to Meta’s new policies? You’ve said that Zuckerberg’s decision would lead to, quote, “a world without facts” and that that was “a world that’s right for a dictator.” So, could you respond to what Marc said now and what you think this means, in particular, for the Philippines, for social media, Meta social media sites in the Philippines?

MARIA RESSA: Well, I mean, first of all, the Philippines, we had a bout with our own dictator starting in 2016. And I would say we were in hell under our previous president, and now we’re in purgatory, while the United States is just headed to hell, it feels like.

Let me quickly say, it’s not a free speech issue, which is what he claims. It’s a safety issue. And exactly what we just heard, what you’re seeing is that now this platform, one that unites more than 3.2 billion people around the world, has declared open season on minorities. Actually, it’s no longer safe for any person, because one of the things that we’ve learned in the Philippines is that the insidious manipulation on this takes away will. Right? So, we already know around the world that it has become a platform that has enabled genocide. This is in Myanmar in Southeast Asia. Meta itself sent a team, and they concurred with the United Nations in two separate findings. The second one is, this is a platform that hacked our biology, that changes the way we feel, fear, anger and hate, to change the way we see the world and the way we act.

Election interference. What you’ve seen now is, as early as 2016, on Brexit, the U.K. actually fined Facebook then, the largest amount at that point in time, because of what would be equivalent to election interference. Nothing else was done beyond that. But again, part of the reason the world is where it is, where, as of last year, 71% of the world is under authoritarian rule, we are electing illiberal leaders democratically, partly because our public information ecosystem, social media, Facebook, is corrupting our individual communications with each other, taking away agency.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maria, could you say, specifically, I mean, in a place like the Philippines, there’s — almost 90% of the population in the Philippines is on Facebook. And how is Facebook used, not only in terms of posting information, but also as a means of communication, and the way in which misinformation has spread on Facebook in the past, not only, of course, in Myanmar, which is the example that you cited, but also in the Philippines and elsewhere?

MARIA RESSA: I mean, very specifically, our past president, Rodrigo Duterte, used the design of what was an advertising and marketing platform of Facebook to do information operations. I was getting an average of 90 — nine, zero — hate messages per hour, free speech used to stifle free speech. But beyond that, these networks of information warfare, networks of disinformation literally changed our history in front of our eyes, setting the stage for the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the only son of our dictator who was in power for 21 years, Ferdinand Marcos. You’ll remember Imelda Marcos and her shoes. Her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., won overwhelmingly in our presidential elections, because, literally, Filipinos were taught in information operations — YouTube, Meta and Facebook — that Marcos was not a dictator, in 1986 ousted in people power; instead, he was the greatest leader the Philippines has ever known.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2021, the Rohingya refugees actually sued Facebook’s parent company Meta over its failure to stop violent hate speech on its platform, which contributed to the bloody military crackdown of the Rohingya Muslim community by the military in 2017 in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Law firms in the U.S. and U.K. launched the legal effort on behalf of the Rohingya around the world, including in Bangladeshi refugee camps. Plaintiffs demanded over $150 billion in damages. The U.N. found as many as 10,000 Rohingya were killed by Burmese forces during the 2017 genocide, though some estimates put the death toll at twice that. Over another 730,000 people were forced to flee the country. I just want to go to a quick video, part of a video, produced by Amnesty, featuring a survivor of the Rohingya genocide.

SAWYEDDOLLAH: My name is Sawyeddollah. I am from Myanmar, but now I am living in Bangladesh, Cox’s Bazar, as a forcibly displaced Myanmar national. [translated] I personally experienced that online hate speech turned into offline hate for us. There were many different things on Facebook against us, which turned the people of Myanmar against us. I saw many different anti-Rohingya posts on Facebook. For example, I still remember a post that said, “The birth rate of these Bengali [Rohingya] people is very high. If it remains continuously like this, we will become their slaves. Now they are our slaves. Let’s go for action.” I knew about the option of reporting hate speech to Facebook. I already reported some hate speech to Facebook, but it only said, “Thank you for reporting. This post doesn’t go against our community standards.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Siva Vaidhyanathan into this conversation, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, a professor at the University of Virginia. And I wanted to go to this issue of hate and how deadly it can be, whether we’re talking about Burma, Myanmar, or whether we’re talking about the United States. I mean, you have, just giving a bunch of examples, roughly seven in 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual adults have encountered any harassment online. Fully 51% have been targeted for more severe forms of online abuse. You have roughly about a third of women under 35 may have been sexually harassed online. You have — a study of 51 countries reveals 38% of women had personally experienced online harassment. Professor Vaidhyanathan, if you can talk about the connection to hate and how that connects to, well, your headline of your Guardian piece, “Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga”?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Right. Well, let’s be clear about this change. And I’m really thrilled that you’ve started this conversation by going beyond the United States. What Mark Zuckerberg announced the other day clearly only applies to the United States in terms of its specificity. In the United States, since 2017, Meta has been trying to at least appear that it’s taking content moderation seriously. And let’s remember, the proper phrase to describe what we’re talking about is “content moderation.” Fact-checking was never part of the formula. It’s not about facts. It’s about protecting users. It’s about protecting people from things like harassment, for protecting groups of people from campaigns and movements, people like citizens of my town, Charlottesville, Virginia, who encountered a flood of violent right-wingers in the summer of 2017 through a movement that was largely organized through Facebook. So, the idea here — and why Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress multiple times swearing that he’s doing a good job — has all been about the United States.

The content moderation policies and procedures and infrastructure beyond the United States have never been sufficient and have never been serious, with the exception of Western Europe. Facebook, like every other digital media company, pays particular attention to the demands and laws of the countries in which it operates. And therefore, it didn’t pay much attention to the demands of content moderation and protecting users in the Philippines. It’s never paid attention to protecting users in India or in Pakistan, in Cambodia, in Uzbekistan. These are places where tremendous propaganda flows through Facebook channels unmitigated.

Now, the United States question, though, in this sense, is: What is Zuckerberg changing? Zuckerberg is scrapping a rather elaborate and expensive system, that sort of worked, to keep the Nazis at bay and to somewhat limit things like harassment and somewhat make sure that the user experience in the United States is not horrifying, the way that one would encounter horrifying material on X today, for instance. He’s gone against that.

And I think it’s wrong to think of this as a pandering to Trump or getting down on his knee to Trump. It’s actually just the opposite. In the United States, the government is subservient to corporations, especially this corporation. Zuckerberg always gets what he wants out of the United States government. He sees an opportunity to get even more of what he wants out of the Trump administration, because what he wants is to be able to threaten and win in a power struggle against Lula in Brazil, who has put forth very strong regulations against all social media companies.

So, Zuckerberg absolutely cares more about Brazil than he does the United States. Brazil is still one of the most fervent and potentially important growth markets for Meta. He’s extremely concerned that the United States be able to use its power to limit regulation in Europe, as well. So what he’s hoping is Trump’s irascible, off-the-hook, unpredictable foreign policy, throwing sticks around the world, might help limit Europe’s willingness to regulate Facebook and Brazil’s willingness to regulate Facebook. This is all about opportunity, not subservience. He is hoping that once again the U.S. government is subservient to Facebook.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Marc Owen Jones, if you could respond to what Meta has said the new form of content moderation will be, this idea of community notes, which is what is operative on Elon Musk’s X, and why you think this decision has been taken now, and what the effect will be?

MARC OWEN JONES: Well, I think it’s very clear that the Community Notes system, which involves basically a certain group of, in X’s case, sort of anointed fact-checkers — not fact-checkers, sort of people commenting on viral posts to determine whether it’s truthful or not — is really problematic. It doesn’t work. And there’s a number of reasons why it doesn’t work, because, essentially, what it’s resulted in is people not correcting facts, but people just posting their opinions as fact. So, what we’re getting is not fact-checking or, in theory, content moderation; we’re getting this relativization of truth, where people just respond to some information that they disagree with politically or for some other reason, and then say the opposite. And so, all you’re doing is getting this kind of situation where it’s not even about verifiable facts anymore, but just about presenting an alternative opinion.

And I think the reason, I mean, this is going to be rolled out, we’re not quite sure, on Meta’s platforms. But it won’t work. And crucially, I think there’s, you know, another point here that’s very interesting. Firstly, for Zuckerberg, him abandoning his fact-checking system is going to save him money. The idea of Community Notes is also, in theory, going to increase engagement, which might mean more profit for Facebook.

But fundamentally, what it’s going to do is just actually create a space in which people are going to engage in increasingly contentious arguments. And there’s a really important point we need to bear in mind here, is that Community Notes also implies that there’s a level playing field when it comes to the kind of information that’s put out there on Facebook, right? We don’t know which posts are getting promoted, which posts will get community noted. We also know that — and I really want to make this point, is that sometimes this Community Notes thing is framed as a bottom-up form of free speech that allows users to engage in debate. It’s not about free speech; it’s about the free market of speech. And the difference is that the free market of speech allows people with authority, influence to actually have a louder voice than others, whether that’s paid advertisers or Facebook’s algorithms deciding which information gets promoted more, and therefore community noted.

And that’s really important, because we know from Facebook all this talk of free speech is misleading, because Facebook have been known, through their testing, to promote content that is, quote-unquote, “bad for the world,” the kind of content that will make you angry or potentially laugh. So, Facebook are in the business of modulating public conversations. And this Community Notes thing is a smokescreen to suggest that Facebook are actually permitting free speech and user-led fact-checking. It’s a system that won’t work, and it’s a system that will just lead to increased polarization and the undermining of democracy by polluting the information space with ideological disinformation.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Vaidhyanathan, Zuckerberg said in his announcement Wednesday that Meta is moving its trust and safety content moderation teams out of California to Texas, a move he said would, quote, “help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.” Now, this comes after the Elon Musk-founded companies Tesla and SpaceX changed their incorporation state from Delaware to Texas — run, of course, with Republican leadership, from Senator Ted Cruz to the governor of Texas. Talk about the significance of this and, as you talk about, you know, Meta going MAGA.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s purely symbolic. It has no operational significance. You know, the people who work in that field — and there will be many fewer of them. That’s important. But the people who work in that field, it doesn’t matter where they sit, right? They’re trained the same way. They have to follow the same rules. It’s a very structured system for content moderation.

The real question here is, all of those thousands of contracted workers, many of whom are in English-speaking countries or partially English-speaking countries around the world, low-wage workers, people in places like India and the Philippines, people who were subjected to hours and hours of horrible images and videos, animal mutilation, child abuse, horrible violence, they are — their fate is that, basically, they won’t have any jobs anymore. You know, they had horrible jobs before, but those contracts will all be canceled.

The small group of domestic Facebook employees will be moved to Texas or — I’m not sure exactly what he means by that. And he may not even follow through on it, right? There’s no reason to believe anything he said. No one will hold him to it. And I don’t think it means much, except that it was a symbolic or signal to — a symbolic signal to the Republicans that this is some sort of candy for them. But I don’t think it’s going to change the Facebook experience in any significant way.

What really will change the Facebook experience is the fact that Community Notes will fail and that our Facebook and Instagram experiences will be filled with hate speech almost immediately. It’s going to become deeply unpleasant. The real question is: Will it become so unpleasant for advertisers that they start pushing back at Meta? And if that happens, because that’s the only other countervailing power at work in this system, then there could be another correction to this policy. And I wouldn’t be surprised by that. Zuckerberg has no principles on these matters, except that what is good for Facebook is good for the world. And everything he does follows from that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Maria Ressa, as Siva said, now we can anticipate these platforms being filled with hate speech. You’ve said that you will do everything possible to, quote, “ensure information integrity.” So, tell us, how do you think individuals and independent news organizations like yours can ensure that there is truthful, fact-checked information available as these sites get flooded with misinformation?

MARIA RESSA: Well, it’s already happened, right? Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “the enshitification of the internet.” And, in fact, I don’t know if you guys saw Shrimp Jesus on Facebook, right? AI-generated crap. This is — and Facebook says that it’s going to be adding more of this.

So, I think the first step is to actually do what we did, which is to collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. The way we were able to take over the center of the Facebook information ecosystem was by creating something we called #FactsFirstPH, a collaboration of about 150 different groups, four-layer pyramid. The bottom were 60 news organizations working together, right? So, fact-checks don’t distribute, don’t spread as fast and as far as lies laced with fear, anger and hate. So what do you do? Well, you have 60 news groups doing daily fact-checks. But the second layer, that’s civil society groups, the church, business groups. That’s the group that is essentially distribution. We called it the mesh layer. We organized ourselves so that every person in these groups will share one fact-check every day, but will share it with emotion.

The third layer were academic partners of ours. We gave a pipeline of the fact-checks of the data, and every week the academic — because, again, who are the first groups under attack? Just like Mark Zuckerberg said in that quote, the journalists. So, as credibility was pushing backwards because we’re under constant attack, the academe came in. And every week leading up to our 2022 elections, academics came in and told people what Meta narratives were being seeded, what was going viral, which candidate was actually winning in this.

And finally, the last layer is lawyers, six different law groups — left, right and center — that protected rule of law. You cannot have rule of law without integrity of facts. And just three or four days before our elections, we did take over the center of the Facebook information ecosystem.

But here’s your problem. Just in order to have facts, you have to work quadruple, four times, five times harder, and you have to collaborate more. That’s an interim solution. The longer-term solution, of course, is the other group that’s abdicated responsibility for protecting the public are actually democratic governments who have failed to build a public tech stack. This is not a free speech issue — again, just to pull together, right? This is — in the end, Facebook is after power and money. And President Trump gave his blessing. Mark Zuckerberg now feels more comfortable. Maybe the cases won’t come, right? That’s what you’re seeing jostling. But the second part is, it will — surveillance capitalism, unchecked, will bring Facebook more money, a company that makes more than $300 billion a year at the expense of the safety of the people on the platform.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. And, of course, Mark Zuckerberg does face, as CEO of Meta, in the coming months, under President Trump, the FTC case around the breakup of Meta, something he’s concerned about losing billions over. Maria Ressa, founder, CEO and executive editor of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work defending free expression. Marc Owen Jones, professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media. And Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, professor at the University of Virginia. We’ll link your piece in The Guardian, “Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga.”

an 1 25

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), announced he was effectively ending efforts to curtail lies on his platforms. Here’s what you need to know and what it means. Today’s Office Hours question is the significance of this change.

Zuckerberg said the new protocol, soon to begin in the United States, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes. But Community Notes has proven to be no protocol at all. Musk put out vicious lies targeting Kamala Harris and obsequious lies favoring Trump during the recent presidential campaign, without any Community Notes warning readers they were lies.

Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will be relocated to Texas from California, in order to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Zuckerberg added — thereby endorsing the rightwing view that Californians are somehow less trustworthy than Texans.

Make no mistake. This is all about currying favor with Trump before he takes over on January 20. Trump has long railed against Zuckerberg, claiming Meta’s fact-checking is unfair to conservatives.

It’s also about dealing with Elon Musk, who’s busily positioning X to be a right-wing megaphone. Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be outflanked on the right.

Meta executives told Trump officials about the change before they announced it to the public. Meta’s announcement coincided with an appearance by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, on “Fox & Friends” — a favorite show of Trump that’s popular with conservatives. Kaplan told the hosts that there had been “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program, again confirming rightwing talking points.

Kaplan, not incidentally, is a former Republican lobbyist with close ties in the Trump administration. His recent promotion is viewed as another attempt to curry favor with Trump.

Meta also added Dana White to its board. White is the C.E.O. of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a staunch Trump ally.

}:

an 1 25

In a move that some viewed as a means of currying favor with the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a video Tuesday that the company is moving to end its third party fact-checking program.

Instead, the company will use a community notes approach, inspired by the Elon Musk's platform X—where Musk's misleading claims about the 2024 presidential election racked up billions of views.

Zuckerberg's announcement was accompanied by a post authored by Meta's new, "Trump-friendly" chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, who described the change as "more speech and fewer mistakes." Kaplan also went on Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning to discuss the update.

"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,' and we are often too slow to respond when they do," wrote Kaplan in his post. Kaplan and Zuckerberg also noted that Meta plans to phase back in more civic content, as in posts about elections, politics, or social issues.

Real Facebook Oversight Board (RFOB), a group established to counter the perceived failures of Meta's own oversight board, blasted the move, saying, "'censorship' is a manufactured crisis, political pandering to signal that Meta's platforms are open for business to far-right propaganda."

"Twitter's shift from fact checking has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuck is joining them in a race to the bottom," the group wrote Tuesday.

The move generated other negative reactions.

"Meta went to Fox News to announce it's ending its third-party fact checking program. Zuck isn't just kissing the ring, he's slobbering all over it," wrote media reporter Oliver Darcy on Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, Kara Swisher, a tech journalist, wrote "toxic floods of lies on social media platforms like Facebook have destroyed trust not fact checkers. Let me reiterate: Mark Zuckerberg has never cared about that and never will."

Co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, Lisa Gilbert, weighed in, saying that "misinformation will flow more freely with this policy change, as we cannot assume that corrections will be made when false information proliferates. The American people deserve accurate information about our elections, health risks, the environment, and much more. We condemn this irresponsible move and the harm it will likely contribute to our discourse."

"Meta's new promise to scale back fact checking isn't surprising—Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else," wrote Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights for the organization Free Press in a Tuesday statement.

Meta, which is angling for the U.S. government to use its AI and is facing an federal antitrust trial this spring, has made other bids to enter Trump's good graces and thaw once frosty relations (Meta temporarily booted Trump from its platforms following his comments regarding the January 6 insurrection). Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund recently and Zuckerberg flew down to Trump's Mar-A-Lago Club to meet with him this past fall.

TPM 12 24

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta donates $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund

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BB trump is checking list

Why are Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are so happy today?

Because with Trump in office, they can realize their dream of becoming trillionaires. Here's what they xitted and threaded today:

• Musk: $285 billion: "It is morning in America again."
• Zuckerberg: $206 billion: "Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration."
• Bezos: $222 billion: "Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love."`

an 10 24

Sometimes you need to step back to see what’s right in front of you.

That alarming fact struck me last week as I watched firsthand how institutional forces conspire to deny Kansans the ability to vote for the candidates of their choice. I don’t believe the parties involved all gathered in some smoke-filled room to make their decisions, but they have nonetheless aligned themselves against pluralistic democracy and encouraged creeping authoritarianism.

On Wednesday, Facebook deleted our post referring to freelancer Grace Hills’ simple story explaining how Kansas can vote in the upcoming election. With Oct. 15 as the deadline for voter registration, the story was a timely reminder of how Kansans could participate in the political life of their state.

But Facebook didn’t want you to see it, claiming that “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” Not only could we not post the article but Kansas Reflector followers couldn’t either. The platform has at various points shut down pages belonging to the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County and Kansas Reflector. Meta, the parent company behind Facebook, apparently has been deploying an artificial intelligence bot that mistakenly targets innocuous political material.

On Thursday, a press briefing from the Alliance for Youth Organizing featured Loud Light president Davis Hammet in a roundtable discussion with youth voting advocates from across the nation. Hammet recounted how the Kansas Legislature passed the bill that essentially shut down voter registration drives formerly carried out by Loud Light, the League of Women Voters and other groups. Those carrying out such drives could theoretically be prosecuted if someone mistook them for government officials, leading to uncertainty and legal exposure. A judge finally blocked the law’s enforcement this summer.

“The reason this really matters is that when you register someone to vote when they’re 18 or 19, they become more likely to vote for the rest of their life,” Hammet said on the call. “And the inverse is true. When they are deprived of that opportunity to get registered, to get engaged, they are less likely to participate. Not just in elections, but in civic life in general for the rest of their life. So voter suppression, but particularly voter registration suppression, causes irreparable harm, not just to young voters but to our entire country and to the idea of democracy.”

I didn’t want to just write about Facebook taking down links to our article. And while youth voting advocacy matters a great deal, Kansas Reflector reporters have covered that story. (Columnists have taken it on, too.)

But then it struck me: This is the same story. This is one and the same story.

This is a story about powerful institutions on the state and national levels who have decided that they want to make it more difficult for people to participate in the political process. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apparently soured on the entire political process and reconciled with former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Kansas legislators have routinely found themselves in thrall to charlatans who claim voter fraud is a pressing threat.

Rather than steel their nerves and push forward with what is obviously the right course of action — engaging people of all ages in the democratic process — the Kansas Legislature and social media oligarchs have decided to shut it all down. Or come as close as they can.

We have no idea how many Kansas youths missed the opportunity to register through a drive conducted by Loud Light or other civic organizations. They may be silenced for decades to come. Likewise, we have no idea how many people browsing Facebook last week might have seen a link to Hills’ story and clicked, learning more about engaging with the political process. Facebook didn’t just suppress the story but actually took it down, leaving them without the opportunity.

In the background, Trump and his poisonous partisans have continued to claim without basis or justification that the 2020 election was stolen and that the 2024 election may be tampered with as well. The first didn’t happen, and the second won’t happen either.

But that’s not the point. These political actors hope to use confusion and anti-democratic messaging to suppress voter turnout and advance their own political project. It’s an absolute scandal. No matter your party, no matter your ideology, no matter your age, or background, please recognize the threat.

Our individual rights do not come from Facebook. They are not granted by shortsighted Kansas legislators. They do not issue forth from one campaign office or another. Our rights belong to us and us alone, as Kansans and Americans. We have the right to guide our government. We have the right to speak against those who would silence us.

We will only be suppressed if we allow ourselves to be.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary,[here

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

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NATION MAG

Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon began the second day of the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival with a sermon. Moon, 45, clutched a gold AR-15 and wore his signature crown of bullets. He stood underneath a big tent in a muddy field in Greeley, Pennsylvania, and told his audience, “In John Chapter 2, we see that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is an assault weapons manufacturer.”

His congregation, dressed in their Sunday best with red Make America Great Again hats, listened intently as Moon explained that Jesus told his disciples to break unconstitutional laws to save America from tyranny. The sermon was short, and Moon abruptly shifted from pastor to emcee. “Welcome to the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, folks. God bless you; may God save America using President Trump and every single one of you. God bless you. MAGA 2024, let’s go, baby!”

Current Issue

October 2024 Issue

In 2017, Rod of Iron Ministries splintered from the Unification Church, a Korean cult founded by Sean Moon’s father, Sun Myung Moon. Adherents are called Moonies and believe that Sun Myung Moon is the messiah. Two of Sun Myung Moon’s sons, Sean and Kook-jin, or Justin, founded Rod of Iron Ministries. The church has many of the same core beliefs as the Unification Church—but it claims that AR-15s are the “rod of iron” that Jesus wields in the Book of Revelation. Perhaps not coincidentally, Justin Moon founded Kahr Arms, a firearms manufacturer that produces a commemorative Donald Trump AR-15.

The two-day festival was free and open to the public, but admission to Friday’s pre-event screening of Flynn, a film about the life of Michael T. Flynn, was $25. The retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser to Donald Trump has been touring to promote the movie. Flynn has partnered with Ivan Raiklin for Q&As across the country.

Raiklin is the man behind the “Pence card,” a legal theory that then–Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked the election certification on January 6, 2021, which led to Trump’s now-infamous tweet saying Pence lacked courage. Raiklin is also the self-appointed secretary of the so-called Department of Retribution, for which he maintains a “Deep State Target List” of journalists, politicians, and other foes. He wants to use sheriffs and local officials to arrest his enemies, and he has said that officials who crafted pro-vaccine Covid-19 policies should face “Public, Live-Streamed (in the interest of transparency) Capital punishment.”

After the first assassination attempt on Trump, Raiklin demanded that the former US Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle be executed. In a social-media post captioned “capital punishment,” Raiklin told Mark Zuckerberg, “There is no lawyering up” to defend his “crime” of restricting some pandemic misinformation on Meta.

Raiklin was not an outlier at the festival. One audience member asked Flynn if, under a Trump presidency, he “would sit at the head of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp?”

Flynn said that accountability is needed, but “we have to win first.” The response was met with cheers. Given that members of the church were involved in the January 6 insurrection, this was not surprising.

...

=

August 29, 2024 rww

• Ivan Raiklin, who has proclaimed himself to be Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” is threatening to have Mark Zuckerberg executed for genocide.

JUDD HEATED ETC SIAD TARGET BY FB? SAME DEAL?

AN 6 24

The biggest conservative news outlets are seeing a precipitous decline in traffic to their websites, and it's showing no sign of abating despite 2024 being a high-profile election season.

On Wednesday, Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona tweeted traffic data compiled by media analyst Howard Polskin's website TheRighting.com, which specializes in tracking conservative media. Polskin assembled a table showing the number of unique visitors (individual internet users who visit a website) a site received in May of 2020 compared to May of 2024, along with a percentage difference in the subsequent column.

Polskin found that high-profile far-right websites like Breitbart, Daily Wire, The Blaze, National Review, Daily Caller and the Federalist all saw sharp drops in unique visitors between the 2020 election cycle and the 2024 cycle. Breitbart — which was led by Steve Bannon before he joined former President Donald Trump's campaign and administration — saw its unique visitors drop from more than five million in 2020 to just over 500,000 last month – a 90% drop. The Federalist, which was co-founded by Meghan McCain's husband, Ben Domenech, saw its unique user count plummet from 3.3 million to 166,000, which is a 95% decline.

READ MORE:**Pro-Trump media landscape 'utterly collapsing' compared to last election cycle: report**

While traffic to other, larger mainstream outlets is also down, the rapid cratering of unique user numbers is mostly concentrated among right-wing media.

Baragona pointing out that

"Even compared to last year, most of the top right-wing media outlets have seen a traffic tailspin. Year over year, the Washington Examiner is down 72%, Outkick has dropped 46% and The Federalist has lost 79% of its audience," Baragona tweeted. "Meanwhile, compared to May 2023, the NYT is up 10%."

One culprit of this traffic decline could be due to Facebook adjusting its algorithm – which is the code that dictates what users see in their respective news feeds — in recent years. In April, Polskin noted that traffic for pro-Trump sites was down by roughly 40% over the past four years, which lines up with Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of changes to the algorithm. In 2018, Zuckerberg announced the feed would begin prioritizing content from users' friends and family over more overtly political content from pages.

Following the changes to the Facebook algorithm, publishers like Dan Bongino, Franklin Graham and Daily Wire, which used to frequently top the social media platform's engagement lists, saw significant drops in likes, comments and shares on their content.

READ MORE:**'Impeachment fatigue' as conservative media distances itself from GOP push: 'Don't have any facts'**

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Atlantic contributor Paul Farhi wrote at the time.

However, this problem may not be confined to news outlets. Baragona observed that Trump's Truth Social platform also saw a significant decline in unique users. In May of 2024, Truth Social had just 2.7 million unique users, which is a 14% drop compared to May of 2023. This marked the platform's second-worst performing month since its launch.

Click here to read Baragona's thread on X (formerly Twitter).

READ MORE: Analysis reveals the real reason conservative media turned on Noem

Study finds over 33 million Instagram, TikTok posts promoting harmful content to kids - Alternet.org

zuck apologiz fam testiony 1 31

after-500m-zuckerberg-donation-harvard-university-gutted-its-disinfo-team-studying-facebook

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zuck and edgelord musk bring him back for bucks

https://www.mediamatters.org**/facebook/trump-used-his-reinstated-facebook-page-post-misinformation-**filled-statement-response-his indict

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-returns-barricades-indicted-donald-trump

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sonali an 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/nepotism-babies-myth-american-meritocracy/

There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.

The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated defensive responses from nepo babies. Jamie Lee Curtis, actor and daughter of famed Hollywood stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wrote a lengthy post on Instagram defending her status. Although she admitted that she benefitted from her parents’ fame—“I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any”—she also clapped back at critics, saying she was tired of assumptions that a nepo baby like her “would somehow have no talent whatsoever.” Curtis went further in claiming that the current focus on people like her was “designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.”

Curtis is clearly a talented actor, of that there is no doubt. But, in defending her privilege from critique, she reveals just how deserving she considers herself. It is the converse of imposter syndrome—the insider syndrome.

The act of calling out nepotism doesn’t necessarily imply that nepo babies are not talented. (Nepo babies are sometimes talented—and sometimes not.) It means pointing out that some talented people are able to benefit from family connections and fame that other equally talented people are not able to.

The critique is intended to call out elitism, not “diminish,” “denigrate” or “hurt,” as Curtis accuses journalists of doing. Journalism that exposes power and its corruptive influence among elites punches up, not down. Curtis is hardly a disadvantaged person whose well-being will suffer from such coverage. Rather, stories pointing out her parental advantages could potentially help to even the playing field so that it is unacceptable in the future to consider family connections in film and TV auditions.

Recall the college admissions scandal of 2019 when it was revealed—again through good journalism—that wealthy parents like TV star Lori Loughlin used all the power and money at their disposal to bend the rules of elite school admissions for their children. Many of those children may well have deserved to get into the schools they attended. But, in the face of stiff competition, untold numbers of equally deserving youth who did not have powerful and wealthy parents willing to break rules were not admitted. Now, many of those same nepo babies’ parents who were tried and convicted are using their money and connections to win shortened prison sentences.

But Hollywood celebrities, however much they enjoy prestige and privilege, are an easy target. Nepotism is rife in all the halls of power—in the world of art, sports, and even journalism, and especially in corporate and political circles.

Billionaires (especially those in tech) may propagate the myth of the merit-based American dream, but some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand. Take Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who became one of the world’s wealthiest people in his 30s. Gates’s early success was largely due to the well-documented connections that his parents flexed on his behalf to get his fledgling company off the ground. Other tech nepo babies include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose father loaned him $100,000 to start his company, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose parents were early investors in his online retail business to the tune of nearly $250,000.

Nepotism is part of the fabric of capitalism. For centuries, unfair advantages were available to those who have historically faced fewer hurdles, through the sheer luck of being born into a family with wealth, connections, or respect within their field. Indeed, in order to beat back the imposter syndrome, many advise channeling the unearned confidence of a mediocre straight white man.

Our economy is rigged to encourage nepotism by ensuring that the already wealthy pass their wealth—and by extension the power that their money buys—to their children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out how the tax code is written in order to benefit the moneyed classes. According to a CBPP report, “High-income, and especially high-wealth, filers enjoy a number of generous tax benefits that can dramatically lower their tax bills.”

Nepo babies who defend their status reinforce the notion that wealth, fame, and privilege equal brilliance, talent, and genius. The reality is that the privileged among us simply have the means to cheat. The rest of us are sold the lie that working hard will bring rewards—rather than unearned wealth.

This, in turn, encourages cheating among those who cannot rely on nepotism to gain power. One well-known example of the “fake-it-till-you-make-it” approach is Anna Sorokin, a woman whose fabricated lies about wealth and power landed her in prison and made her the focus of a Netflix show. Sorokin faked being a nepo baby—a German heiress—in order to live a lavish lifestyle. Sorokin learned that to gain the edge that moneyed elites have, one must internalize the insider syndrome.

Republican Congressman George Santos, who was recently exposed as a fraud for lying about his work experience, wealth, and even ethnicity, is another prime example. His political party has made a habit of encouraging (real or fake) nepo babies like Donald Trump, who openly admitted to tax avoidance in a debate and whose company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.

The GOP has for years led the charge to protect the interests of the wealthy while insisting on means testing and drug testing for the rest of us to receive benefits.

In truth, the emperor has no clothes. The meritocracy of American capitalism is a myth built on smoke and mirrors, on lies and false confidence. The current long-overdue conversation around nepo babies may help to further class consciousness among Americans who may see a bit more clearly now just how scantily clad the emperor really is.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

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11/15 announces, stephen schwarzman hard no

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/facebook-fact-checkers-donald-trump/

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meta is holding corp like alphabet

~ metaverse

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/zuckerberg-metaverse/

gladwell pod comic bariss? sp

evening rocket boys with tpys sci fi ~ ursala kroeber ishi , octavia

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bunch of deflective desperate twtstorms?

Former President Donald Trump on Monday called for a redo of the 2020 election in an angry rant on his financially imperiled Twitter knockoff app Truth Social.

:{:{At 11:39 a.m., Trump stated that he should be declared the winner of the contest that he lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden:}:

}:

So now it comes out, conclusively, that the FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that, if they didn’t, 'Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election.' This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!

Trump's outrage stemmed from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's revelation to podcaster Joe Rogan last Thursday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Zuckerberg that articles relating to Hunter Biden's laptop were pieces of Russian propaganda. Facebook then suppressed posts about the president's son and his computer.

READ MORE:Donald Trump ends his weekend by insulting NASA

The FBI said in a statement after Zuckerberg's interview with Rogan that it "routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats."

The FBI alsotold Fox Business that "foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors."

READ MORE:Donald Trump's lawyer falsely claims FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Liz Cheney lost her primary

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town hall  BS so beware spin

8 22 bs

fBI Responds to Zuckerberg's Claims About Hunter Biden's Laptop

Sarah ArnoldSarah Arnold|Posted: Aug 28, 2022

FBI Responds to Zuckerberg's Claims About Hunter Biden's Laptop

The FBI responded to claims made by Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, saying that it “routinely notifies” social media companies of potential threats.

During a podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg told the host that Facebook’s restrictions surrounding the New York Post’s 2020 article on Hunter Biden were based on FBI misinformation warnings. 

The Post’s article reported that data recovered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden included emails which indicated that President Joe Biden used his position and power as then- vice president to help his son, Hunter, in business dealings with Ukraine.

Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook suppressed stories on the platform related to the article on Hunter Biden and his laptop after the FBI warned the social media company to be aware of potentially polarizing content. 

:{:{}:

}:

“The FBI has provided companies with foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors,” the agency said in a statement. 

In response to Zuckerberg’s comments, many speculate that Facebook censored information that may make Biden look bad ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

“[The FBI] routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” according to the agency.

twt

chuck g

We now know Facebook censored spread of Hunter Biden laptop story after FBI approached them. FBI & Facebook/Big Tech interfered in 2020 election Facebook acted as an arm of govt Both Facebook & FBI should b ashamed of interfering in our electoral process

Recommended

Judge Might Grant Something ‘Special’ for Trump Following FBI Raid

Matt Vespa

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that big tech interfered with the election so that results came out favorable for Democrats.

“FBI & Facebook/Big Tech interfered in 2020 election Facebook acted as an arm of govt.,” Grassley said in a tweet.

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FB will rebrand as toxic

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10 21 an

The regulatory office for Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine has announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been added as a defendant in connection with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

According to NBC News, Racine filed the complaint under D.C.'s Consumer Protection Procedures Act which opens the door for individuals to be held accountable for violations.

The attorney general insists evidence compiled over the last two years makes it quite "clear Mr. Zuckerberg knowingly and actively participated in each decision that led to Cambridge Analytica's mass collection of Facebook user data, and Facebook's misrepresentations to users about how secure their data was."

Per the publication, the complaint has laid out a number of allegations against the company CEO.

"Zuckerberg was personally aware of the risks that sharing consumer data with apps posed, but actively disregarded those risks because sharing data was otherwise beneficial and lucrative to Facebook's business model and Platform growth."

Racine also insists Zuckerberg had a role in misleading not only the public but also the United States government regarding the social media platform's involvement in the scandal. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone released a statement on behalf of the social media platform. According to Stone, Facebook is denying the allegations.

"These allegations are as meritless today as they were more than three years ago, when the District filed its complaint," Stone said in a statement. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts."

The Guardian and The New York Times released reports about the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2018. At the time, it was revealed that the firm "harvested information from 50 million Facebook profiles." The social media platform later confirmed "data on as many as 87 million people were improperly shared with the company."

If it is determined that either Zuckerberg or his company broke the law, they could be forced to cover the costs of civil penalties, legal fees, and restitution to all victims involved.

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an 1021 no lnx

America is sleepwalking towards fascism

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 08, 2021

AT&T and Facebook are unaccountable. Donald Trump's still free. This week saw an overwhelming number of stories all pointing to the same conclusion: American authoritarianism is on the rise, juiced and protected by some of the richest and most powerful people in the United States.

Due to a combination of whistleblowers, investigations, and, in many cases, utter shamelessness on the part of fascism enablers, this is now out in the open. And yet, despite Democrats controlling both Congress and the White House, serious action to fight back and save American democracy remains underwhelming to nonexistent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for instance, released a sobering report this week detailing the extent of Donald Trump's efforts to force the Department of Justice to fabricate evidence for use as a pretext to nullify the 2020 election. The report details nine separate instances of Trump pressuring acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to enact a scheme, concocted by another DOJ lawyer named Jeffrey Clark, to overturn the election. Trump was not exactly subtle about what he expected from Rosen. On January 3 — three days before Trump resorted to inciting violence in a last-ditch effort to overthrow the election — Trump called a meeting and opened it by complaining, "One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election."

As Heather "Digby" Parton writes at Salon, "The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup."

Senate Republicans are defending Trump on the grounds that this effort failed, which, as I point out in today's Standing Room Only newsletter, is the equivalent of saying attempted murder isn't a real crime. And the reason they're defending him is not mysterious. He's going to run again in 2024 — and will try to steal the election again, as well — and he does so with the full support of the GOP establishment, which is manipulating state election laws to make it easier for Trump next time.

This week, as well, Reuters published a disturbing report exposing how One America News, which can aptly be described as an authoritarian propaganda channel supporting Trump's demands to be installed illegally as president, is being bankrolled by the communications giant AT&T.

OAN's founder, Robert Herring Sr., not only claims that OAN was started at the request of AT&T executives but that court records show "AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue." AT&T defends this by saying they offer "many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum," but of course, OAN is not "news," because they heavily supported false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. OAN is profiting handsomely from Trump's insurrection, as the "network's online audience soared in November after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden's victory."

Fascist propaganda, it turns out, is very good business indeed. This ugly reality, that there's money to be made in elevating false, authoritarian propaganda, was also highlighted in the rolling news stories this week around Facebook, stemming from the revelations offered by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen collected thousands of documents during her time working for the civic integrity department at Facebook, which she says was marginalized precisely because having civic integrity is not good for profit. Haugen's documentation demonstrated what many have long suspected based on public evidence: Facebook knows that right-wingers are using their platform to spread disinformation and undermine democracy. They just don't care because authoritarian disinformation is wildly popular and therefore good for business.

This is why the right is freaking out and spreading conspiracy theories to discredit Haugen. They depend heavily on Facebook to distribute their false, inflammatory propaganda, and without it, their efforts to undermine democracy would lose a lot of power.

These stories are all troubling. The situation is clear-cut. There's a powerful authoritarian leader gunning to destroy democracy and install himself as the nation's leader. He has not just the full support of a major political party and the political power to arrange the laws to make this happen for him, but a propaganda apparatus that touches every corner of American life. Corporate interests may front like they oppose this, but behind the scenes, they offer material support to fascists because they see doing so as profitable. None of this is a secret.

And yet ... nothing substantive is being done.

The Senate Judiciary released a report detailing Trump's extensive efforts to overthrow democracy, and yet there's not a whiff of a hint that there's any movement from the Department of Justice to hold him criminally accountable for his actions. On the contrary, the DOJ is helping Trump, by shielding his Justice Department appointees from being questioned by congressional investigators. The assault on free and fair elections on the state level has been thoroughly documented, but legislation that would prevent these anti-democratic actions is moribund in a Democratic-controlled Congress because a couple of Democratic senators prioritize the filibuster over democracy itself. Democrats control some of the most powerful offices in the land, and yet they act helpless to stop the ongoing coup effort being conducted by a private citizen in Florida who has a criminal rap sheet many times longer than should be necessary to put him away for years.

There curiously has also been no accountability for the corporate interests who support rising fascism because it's in their financial interests to do so.

Haugen's whistleblowing efforts focused heavily on attempts to expose Facebook's role in spreading right-wing disinformation, but when she was brought up for a Senate hearing, it was to talk about teen girls and self-esteem, a problem even the Insurrectionist Caucus is happy to pull faces and claim to be upset by. It's an important issue, to be sure, but in the face of the literal end to American democracy, it's questionable whether teen self-esteem should be the main priority for the Senate when it comes to Facebook.

There's just no way out of it. The country is sleepwalking its way into an authoritarian overthrow of democracy.

There's plenty of journalism and exposés on all of these social forces Trump is exploiting to capture the White House in 2024. Yet, despite all of the noise, there's little in the way of action to change things. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Democrats have real power, and even if a couple of no-good centrist Democrats are standing in the way of electoral reform, there are surely other actions that could be taken to stop Trump. A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And it's one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.

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harv 2017 taLK

kid killer teen suicide?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/facebook-teen/

salon

It's been a rough week for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Ire against the 37-year-old Harvard dropout and his social media platform has been one of the rare points of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill this week as revelation after revelation about Facebook's pitfalls continues to trickle out, many from a series of internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Lawmakers are now calling for Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress, in particular about a number of internal reports cited by the Journal that determined Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had a marked negative impact on young women.

Researchers for the company reportedly found in March of 2020 that "32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse." In another study, Facebook found that more than 40% of teenage Instagram users in the U.S. and U.K. reported feeling "unattractive", and said the feeling began on the app.

This information was allegedly shared with Zuckerberg personally last year during a presentation — though he didn't mention any of those findings at a Congressional hearing just a few months ago on the impacts of social media on children, saying simply, "Social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits."

When asked point-blank whether Facebook researches the effects of social media he added, "I believe the answer is yes."

A group of Democrats, including Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Reps. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., wrote a letter to Zuckerberg asking him to scrap plans to roll out a version of Instagram specifically for children.

Another bipartisan group of Senators, announced a probe of told CNBC Tuesdaythey are "in touch with a Facebook whistleblower and will use every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it — including seeking further documents and pursuing witness testimony."

The head of public policy at Instagram, Karina Newton, responded to the allegations in a blog post highlighting research by Pew Internet on teens in the US that stated"81% of teens said that social media makes them feel more connected to their friends, while 26% reported social media makes them feel worse about their lives."Newton also said the company is researching ways to shift users away from repeatedly looking at certain topics that might "contribute to negative social comparison."

Among the other pitfalls the Journal uncovered at Facebook include reports that cartel activity on both Facebook and Instagram has gone unchecked, and that worldwide, the response to posts that are against the terms of use is "inadequate" at best and at worst, is non-existent. Other reports found that while Zuckerberg himself wanted to use Facebook to get America vaccinated, the platform was a breeding ground for anti-vaxxers, who "swarmed" the WHO and UNICEF pages with comments against the vaccine. The MIT Technology Review also obtained an internal report that foreign troll farms were able to reach more than 140 million Americans a month with misinformation leading up to last year's election, a development that surely had an effect on the millions of Americans who still believe, without any real evidence, that President Joe Biden's victory was somehow illegitimate.

The news also highlights how the ownership structure of Facebook essentially allows Zuckerberg to rule by decree — despite the protests of others both within and outside the publicly traded company. Zuckerberg holds 57.9% of the voting power at the company and is both chairman of the board and CEO, meaning there's not much anyone else can do to promote greater transparency or big-picture changes that they believe may be better for society.

"At Facebook, the annual general meeting is largely just theater," Robert Bartlett, a law professor at UC Berkeley who teaches securities regulation and corporate finance, told Marketwatch this week.

But even without voting power, shareholders of the company are still pushing the company to make changes that would benefit society as a whole — part of a trend that has seen "activist investors" take greater control over behemoth companies that have long operated with one goal and one goal only: profit.

The most high profile example came earlier this year when an "activist" hedge fund managed to win three seats on the board of ExxonMobil — the result of continued backlash against the company for the role it plays in climate change.

It remains unclear whether Mark Zuckerberg will make any changes at Facebook as a result of this week's news.

an 721 me

While it may appear that Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg and former President Donald Trump are often on completely different sides of the fence given the former president's loathing of Big Tech, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has highlighted a similarity between the two: their "hoary tradition" of "outfoxing history."

As a flurry of new tell-all books are being released, Dowd has managed to connect interesting dots between two of the forthcoming books. In her op-ed piece published by The Times, Dowd outlined the similar professional doctrines that have existed at both the White House and Facebook.

Using the book, "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination," she noted how New York Times writers Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang detailed the unspoken understanding among those at Facebook.

"Don't bring the boss bad news or push back. Exercise willful blindness about the disaster around the corner, and then, once it arrives, manage it badly," Dowd wrote, adding, "Put the syndicate over democracy. Blame others for your mistakes, especially the unfair media. Present yourself as doing good for the world when you're doing bad."

While Facebook is thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., Dowd noted that the Trump White House operated along the same lines. In the new, highly publicized book, "I Alone Can Fix It," Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig explained how Trump also operated in a similar fashion. However, Trump's level of deflecting and control reached new heights when it came to the presidential election.

According to Rucker and Leonnig, even Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump "had become increasingly uncomfortable with efforts to overturn the election results." In fact, she even expressed concern about her father's persistence in pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to do his bidding.

It would likely be optimistic to think should behavior would wane as time progresses, that does not appear to be the case here.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/experts-warned-facebooks-ad-bans-wouldnt-stop-election-misinformation-they-were-right

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-testified-facebook-performed-well-during-2020-election-media-matters-has

1120

he tossed a bit of $ at encourge ppl to vote (as cover for fb fail on conspiracy?

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/laura-ingraham-blames-huge-amounts-money-mark-zuckerberg-and-george-soros-local

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/latest-senate-hearing-social-media-bias-was-just-another-example-right-wingers-working

parker m

On Wednesday, the Senate commerce committee held a hearing about content moderation on social media platforms, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were called as witnesses. The hearing was ostensibly about possible reform to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, but the goal of the Republican senators who called it was clearly to influence how these platforms enforce their policies in the days leading up to and following next week’s elections.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went so far as to promote the hearing like some type of boxing match between himself (“the free speech champion”) and Dorsey (“the czar of censorship”), and he used his speaking time to berate the CEO for their content moderation policies.

The hearing served as a public forum for conservatives to work the refs, accusing these platforms of having anti-conservative bias in an effort to spur more favorable treatment. Of course, there isn’t actually anti-conservative bias on social media platforms -- quite the opposite, actually.

A new nine-month Media Matters study of Facebook pages posting political content found that right-leaning pages outperformed left-leaning and politically neutral pages in the number of average weekly interactions they accrued. Studies published in August 2019, April 2019, and July 2018 found similar disparities or equal performance. Past studies of Facebook have found that conservative pages dominate liberal and neutral pages on topics including abortion, immigration, and transgender issues, as well. While Zuckerberg may deny that Facebook is a “right-wing echo chamber,” his belief isn’t supported by the facts.

In fact, Zuckerberg has made repeated overtures to the right when conservatives claim to be the victims of bias on the platform. Zuckerberg hired lifelong Republican operatives to head global policy and election policy initiatives, and earlier this year he hired a former *Fox & Friends* senior producer to head video strategy for Facebook News. A February Washington Post report outlined some of the many ways Zuckerberg has tried to appease conservatives, which included the torpedoing of a plan to address fake news websites, the politically motivated inclusion of Breitbart in its news tab program, and meetings with the likes of Corey Lewandowski, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and a bevy of conservative commentators in 2016.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg talks regularly with White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and has built a relationship with Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, whose content happens to be some of the most shared on the entire platform. That same Wall Street Journal report showed that Facebook’s actions to help conservatives had the effect of reducing traffic to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones.

Even with all of this evidence showing how Facebook supports them, conservatives still play the role of victims. It will never, ever be good enough for them.

“What we are watching -- the militarization of social media on behalf of Democrats, and the overt suppression of material damaging to Democrats to the cheering of the press -- is one of the single most dangerous political moments I have ever seen,” Shapiro wrote on Twitter, seemingly oblivious to the way social media companies promote his content at the expense of liberal articles.

Evidence of anti-conservative bias is always thin, based on faulty comparisons, or just outright false. During the hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) brought up a recent Media Research Center report that claimed that Trump was “censored” 65 times on social media. This was a particularly weak and easily debunked point, and it goes to show just how much of a reach conservatives are making when they claim to be the victims of bias.

Conservatives have called tech CEOs in front of Congress over and over and over and over, usually under the guise of an anti-trust hearing or a chance to comment on reforming Section 230. But they’re clearly interested only in trying to coerce these companies into giving them an advantage.

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Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

Bloomberg Businessweek. 17 September 2020.

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Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

Employees fear Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is more about protecting the president than the company’s ideals.

By  and September 17, 2020,

In late 2019, during one of Mark Zuckerberg’s many trips to Washington to defend Facebook in front of Congress, he stopped for a private dinner with Donald Trump and offered the president a titillating statistic. “I’d like to congratulate you,” Zuckerberg said. “You’re No.1 on Facebook.”

At least that’s the story as told by Trump, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in January. Trump is technically not the top politician by followers on Facebook. That would be former President Barack Obama. But as the country’s most powerful newsmaker and the person in charge of a government that’s been aggressively pursuing antitrust cases against big tech companies, he does have leverage over Zuckerberg. So the chief executive officer could be forgiven for flattering Trump. Any moment that the president is happy with Facebook is a moment he’s not pursuing hostile regulation—or more likely, sparking a bad news cycle.

Facebook Inc. declined to comment on whether Zuckerberg indeed told Trump he was No.1 and, if so, in what category he meant, but it’s adamant that its founder isn’t playing favorites. After the New York Times speculated that the dinner between Zuckerberg and Trump might have involved a deal over whether Facebook would fact-check the president, Zuckerberg said he was simply stopping by the White House because he was in town. “The whole idea of a deal is pretty ridiculous,” he told Axios in July.

Longtime current and former employees say this denial may be a bit misleading. Zuckerberg isn’t easily influenced by politics. But what he does care about—more than anything else perhaps—is Facebook’s ubiquity and its potential for growth. The result, critics say, has been an alliance of convenience between the world’s largest social network and the White House, in which Facebook looks the other way while Trump spreads misinformation about voting that could delegitimize the winner or even swing the election. “Facebook, more so than other platforms, has gone out of its way to not ruffle feathers in the current administration,” says Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, an organization making recommendations to tech companies on public-policy issues. “At best, you could say it’s willful negligence.”

The pattern hasn’t been confined to U.S. politics. A Facebook executive in India was accused in August of granting special treatment to a lawmaker from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who’d called for violence against Rohingya Muslim immigrants. (It was only after the Wall Street Journal reported on the posts that the company banned the lawmaker, T. Raja Singh.) A memo from a former employee, published by BuzzFeed on Sept. 14, detailed how Facebook had ignored or delayed taking action against governments using fake accounts to mislead their citizens. “I have blood on my hands,” she wrote.

“You can continuously see the challenge of them trying to have these kinds of broad principles around free expression and stopping harm, and then that mixing with the realpolitik of trying to keep the executive branch happy,” said Alex Stamos, the former top security executive at Facebook, at a conference in June. Facebook executives say their only loyalty is to free speech. “The idea that there is systematic or deliberate political bias in our decisions I really don’t think is borne out by the facts,” says Nick Clegg, head of policy and communications. “Of course, there are isolated cases.”

“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind”

Facebook executives often point out that the company was seen as overly friendly to Democrats during the Obama years and that it takes plenty of heat from the Right. In the summer of 2016, the tech website Gizmodo wrote that it had been directing employees to suppress pro-Trump sites in its trending news section. The story led to a scandal over supposed anticonservative bias at social media companies, and it was in response to this backlash that Facebook started to drift rightward. The company flew conservative commentators to its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to reassure them that there was no need for concern about how Facebook operated.

The romancing continued after election day as Facebook celebrated Trump’s victory. In January 2017, the company co-hosted an inauguration party with the Daily Caller, which has published writers who have espoused white nationalist views.The lemons in the catered drinks were stamped with Facebook logos. An internal report from around the same time touted Trump’s superior strategy with Facebook ads, noting that Trump followed advice and training from the company that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had rejected. Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period,” Andrew Bosworth, who currently runs the company’s efforts in augmented and virtual reality and who was head of ads at the time, wrote in a memo to employees in 2018.

Facebook’s mostly liberal staff saw its Republican relationship-building as the price of doing business, but as the company weathered public scrutiny—about Russia’s spread of election misinformation, as well as its failure to stop Cambridge Analytica’s data-gathering operation—something changed. Among the rank and file, and even among some executives, the shift went from grudging professional admiration for Trump to a realization that he was using Facebook to attack many of the issues employees cared about. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, during which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, head of policy Joel Kaplan was shown seated directly behind the nominee, a close friend. The days following, several Facebook employees say, was the first time they saw colleagues cry openly at Zuckerberg’s weekly question-and-answer sessions.

After the Kavanaugh hearings, employees began to notice that Kaplan, George W. Bush’s former deputy chief of staff, seemed more concerned about critiques of bias from conservatives than from liberals. Facebook’s internal data showed that conservative voices are consistently the most popular on the site. (On a recent Monday morning, the top 10 Facebook posts, by interactions—such as likes, shares, and comments—included eight from conservative pundits and news outlets, one from Ivanka Trump, and one from NPR.) But in 2019, under pressure from the same group who’d visited before Trump’s election, Kaplan commissioned a yearlong independent study that concluded the opposite. “There is still significant work to be done to satisfy the concerns we heard from conservatives,” it said.

Historically, Facebook had given executives in charge of its products immense leeway in making decisions, but suddenly the company’s policy team seemed to have veto power.In January 2018, Zuckerberg asked to reduce the prevalence of news in users’ feeds, especially from incendiary and untrustworthy outlets. The product team tweaked the news feed, but then members of Kaplan’s team reviewed test simulations. They noted that the product change was causing traffic to drop more severely for right-wing outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart News, according to a person familiar with the incident who spoke with Bloomberg Businessweek on the condition of anonymity. 

Of course, this was because Fox and Breitbart tend to publish more incendiary content—Breitbart famously once had a “black crime” section on the site. So the engineers were ordered to tweak the algorithm a little more until it punished liberal outlets as much as conservative ones, before releasing the update to 2.5 billion users. Fox maintained its position as the top publisher on Facebook. This kind of review wasn’t unusual, employees say. The policy team would regularly investigate whether changes would affect right-leaning outlets while seeming less concerned about the effects on more left-leaning ones. A Facebook spokesman denies that Kaplan’s pushback was partisan and says the algorithm was not changed as a result of his concerns.

As employees started to worry about Facebook’s proximity to the Right, Facebook’s M-Team—“M” for management—seemed intent on pushing the company even closer to it.At one point, the group flew to New York for a leadership off-site at the headquarters of News Corp., which like Fox News is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family. One executive, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom (who left the company in 2018), refused to attend, citing Fox’s polarizing influence, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company says it regularly meets with media outlets. Systrom didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Eventually, Trump pushed the limits. In the early morning hours of May 29, he posted a message to his 29.5 million Facebook followers, warning protesters in Minneapolis that they were risking violent retribution. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the president wrote. It was a formulation that’s long been associated with police brutality. A similar threat was used by the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace.

Trump had said the same on Twitter, which quickly hid his post, saying it violated rules against glorifying violence. Zuckerberg waited, leaving the post up for hours while consulting his top lieutenants to discuss what to do. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Kaplan, and Clegg all weighed in. So did Maxine Williams, the company’s head of diversity. And then, that afternoon, another very influential figure piped up: the president himself, who spoke to Zuckerberg by phone. Zuckerberg said later that he told Trump he disagreed with the post and found it unhelpful. But, crucially, he also didn’t think it went against Facebook’s rules.

Trump’s post remained on Facebook, sparking a virtual walkout. Employees began criticizing Zuckerberg openly and leaking to the press. “Mark is wrong,” tweeted Ryan Freitas, director of product design for the company’s news feed, “and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind.” A flurry of stories appeared over the next two months detailing instances that reinforced the suspicions about the alliance between Facebook and Trump.For instance, media outlets reported that the president had no negative hashtags associated with his name on Instagram, while Joe Biden had lots; that a Facebook employee was fired after complaining that the company seemed to be allowing far-right pundits, such as Diamond and Silk, to break rules about misinformation; and that an investigation into Ben Shapiro, whose site the Daily Wire routinely broke the rules to boost its audience, was thwarted by Kaplan’s policy group.

Employees also noticed a difference between Zuckerberg’s relationship with Trump and his interactions with his Democratic opponent. In a June 29 letter addressed to Clegg, Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, pointed out three instances where she felt Trump had shared voting misinformation and asked if Facebook “will apply its policies impartially.” In a separate letter on July 10, campaign general counsel Dana Remus accused Facebook of hypocrisy. “Your company’s actions fail to live up to its stated commitments,” she wrote. Zuckerberg hasn’t spoken to Biden all year.

After the looting-and-shooting post, Facebook’s policy team contacted the White House to explain the company’s process, which lead to Trump’s phone call with Zuckerberg. During the delay, the post got millions of views. Around the same time, Biden posted an open letter asking Facebook to stem the tide of misinformation. Facebook clapped back in public. “The people’s elected representatives should set the rules, and we will follow them,” it said in a blog post. “There is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.” The message was clear: We listen to the government in charge.

By now, Facebook’s failures during the 2016 election are well known.A group backed by the Russian government used the company’s products to promote Trump and disparage Clinton, according to the report issued by special counsel Robert Mueller. For instance, Russian operatives created fake accounts aimed at Black voters, seen as a key part of Clinton’s base. They told people who followed these accounts they shouldn’t bother voting, or that they should vote by text message, which isn’t possible. In all, the Russian posts reached more than 150 million Americans.

The job of rooting out fake content created by foreign governments falls to Facebook’s election integrity and cybersecurity groups, which are separate from the policy team and, in theory, nonpartisan. Facebook has gotten better at finding these campaigns. Last year alone, it removed 50 networks of accounts like the Russian one from 2016. But some former employees have complained of being ignored or sidelined based on political concerns. In 2018, Yaël Eisenstat, a former CIA intelligence officer, worked on a plan to use software to scan ads for language that could give false information about voting procedures. The proposal was rejected, Eisenstadt was told, because the problem wasn’t urgent enough. She left that November.

The following year, Facebook did make rules against giving incorrect information about how to vote, but then it froze when Trump actually put the policy to the test. On May 20, a week before the looting-and-shooting post, the president claimed that officials in Michigan and Nevada were sending out mail-in ballots illegally, which was not true. A few days later, on May 26,Trump posted that California was mailing ballots to “anyone living in the state,” another lie. The posts stayed up, and Zuckerberg went on Fox News to criticize Twitter, which had fact-checked similar posts. An outside civil rights auditor later concluded that Facebook failed to enforce its own policies in both instances.

Instead Zuckerberg came up with something new—what he called “the largest voting information campaign in U.S. history,” a plan to register 4 million voters. Facebook also designed a “voting information center,” a webpage with facts about the election compiled from state authorities. The social media network has been promoting the page atop every user’s Facebook and Instagram feed and attaches a link to it with every post on the service that mentions the election process. The hub “ensures that people can see the post and hear from their elected officials, warts and all, but also have accurate context about what the experts are saying,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters in August.

But the links below Trump’s ever-more-frequent postings about voting do not warn Facebook users if the information is untrue—they simply advertise an information center. Moreover, after Republicans complained about the voter registration efforts, Facebook seemed to back off further, according to emails obtained by the Tech Transparency Project. The company had planned a two-day promotion over the July 4th holiday on Facebook, as well as on Instagram and Messenger, but then cut that down to a one-day push on Facebook alone.

Facebook has said that the suggestion that the company scaled down its voter registration plans for political reasons is “pure fabrication.” Another spokesman, replying to a Twitter user who suggested the same, responded with a picture of a woman in a tin foil hat.

The company, of course, knows lots about conspiracy theorists, who thrive on the site. There’s QAnon, a far-right movement that espouses a complex theory involving a cabal of elites engaged in child sex trafficking. The FBI deemed it a form of domestic terrorism in August 2019, but Facebook only started removing accounts in May. The company also initially ignored posts tied to a Kenosha, Wis., militia in which users discussed shooting Black Lives Matter protesters. The militia’s event page was flagged more than 400 times, but moderators allowed it to stay up, according to BuzzFeed. Not long after the posts began appearing, a 17-year-old with an assault rifle shot and killed two people at a protest in the city.

Even as employees accuse Facebook of aiding Trump’s reelection effort, the administration has kept up the pressure on the company. In late May the president signed an executive order threatening to revoke the immunity enjoyed by social media companies, including Facebook, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, if they showed political bias. The order was an apparent threat to social networks that censored posts from Trump and his allies. Facebook responded by saying the move would restrict free speech.

Trump’s threats haven’t yet materialized into anything crippling—at least not for Facebook. The U.S. Department of Justice is preparing a case against the company’s main rival, Google, which it’s expected to file before Election Day. Meanwhile, Trump has forced another key Facebook competitor, Chinese-owned TikTok, to find a U.S. buyer or face ejection from the country.

So far, Zuckerberg’s cultivation of Trump has seemed to keep Facebook safe from the president’s ire. But Trump is trailing by 7 points or so nationally, and it’s likely that a Biden administration would seek to regulate Facebook. In July, Zuckerberg got a preview of the Democrats’ playbook when he faced the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, alongside all the other major tech executives. Representatives’ questions for him were pointed, prosecutorial, and informed by thousands of internal emails and chat logs that seemed to suggest a path for regulators to argue that the company should be broken up or penalized in some other way.

“All of these companies engage in behavior which is deeply disturbing and requires Congress to take action,” David Cicilline, the Rhode Island representative who’s the panel’s chairman, told Bloomberg in August, the same day Facebook’s stock hit a record high. He said he was especially struck by the “casual way” Zuckerberg admitted to buying Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate them as competitors. Facebook disputes Cicilline’s statement and says both acquisitions have not harmed competition.

Biden, meanwhile, has said he also favors removing Section 230 protections and holding executives personally liable. “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan,” he told the New York Times in January. Zuckerberg seems keenly aware of the risks of a Trump loss. He’s told employees that Facebook is likely to fare better under Republicans, according to people familiar with the conversations.

This isn’t to say Facebook wouldn’t adapt if Biden wins in November. In June, Zuckerberg announced he’d rehired Chris Cox, former chief product officer, who’d been active in Democratic politics since leaving Facebook last year. Cox is widely considered to be the most likely candidate to become CEO if the Facebook founder ever stepped down. “Nothing stays the same, of course not,” says Clegg, the VP for communications, when asked how Facebook would adjust to a future Biden administration. “We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.”

Read next: Palantir Is Bad-Mouthing Big Tech While Taking Its Tech Public

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-denies-facebook-right-wing-echo-chamber-facts-tell-different-story

In a new interview with Mike Allen of Axios, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the social media platform from accusations of being a “right-wing echo chamber,” explained why the site doesn’t treat anti-vaccination content the same way it treats COVID-19 misinformation, andcontemplated whether history will look back on the company as “an accelerant of social destruction.” But contrary to what Zuckerberg said, Facebook is a right-wing echo chamber, even if he doesn’t like that characterization.

During the most recent episode of Axios on HBO, host Mike Allen confronted Zuckerberg with some uncomfortable truths about what sort of content is currently thriving on his platform. Zuckerberg’s counter-argument was not especially strong. [vid]

ALLEN (HOST): President Obama very effectively leveraged Facebook for two elections, but now that’s flipped. And Facebook, the reality is, is a real right-wing echo chamber. If you look at some of the loudest voices on Facebook, it’s your Breitbart, and it’s Sarah Palin, and it’s Franklin Graham, and that part of the spectrum has figured out Facebook in this moment. Your liberal friends must hate it.

MARK ZUCKERBERG (FACEBOOK CEO): Well, look, I think your characterization, frankly, is just wrong. I don’t think that the service is a right-wing echo chamber, to use your words. I think that everyone can use their voice and can find media that they trust that reflects the opinions and the life experiences that they’re having. Some people, I think, had found before that their experiences weren’t being covered by traditional media and now are able to find voices and follow them that resonate more with their life experience. It’s not clear to me that that’s a bad thing. But look, I mean, the stories that get the most reach on a day-to-day basis are the same things that people talk about in the mainstream. They’re not highly partisan political issues. It’s just meaningful news that’s happening on a day-to-day basis.

But Zuckerberg’s denial that the platform presents “highly partisan” stories in a right-wing media echo chamber is simply false. New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose has been documenting Facebook’s best-performing content. Day after day, the results tell a tough truth: Facebook is overflowing with right-wing content.

Since July 2018, Media Matters has published multiple studies countering claims that conservatives were somehow being censored on Facebook, finding each time that the opposite was actually the case. In fact, Axios itself reported in September 2019 that tech companies have secret data showing that conservative pages outperform liberal ones.

Media Matters’ coverage illustrates just how much of a right-wing echo chamber Facebook has become.

• In August, Media Matters published a 19-month timeline of Facebook’s failures and reported that a pro-Trump PAC was being allowed to run hundreds of ads lying about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s policy positions. Facebook alsorefused to take action for months on a manipulated video made to look like Biden was introducing a singer in blackface.
• We’ve found that on certain topics, such as reproductive rights, immigration, and trans issues, right-wing outlets have dominated the conversation on Facebook entirely, even when the information they publish is misleading or outright false.
• Despite bans on promoting anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy, the QAnon conspiracy movement, misleading claims about voting, and misinformation about the census, Facebook has struggled with enforcement and continued to enable such dangerous right-wing content to spread on its platform.
• Earlier this year, Facebook teamed up with Fox News for a coronavirus town hall, despite Fox’s long record of COVID-19 misinformation. (This follows last year’s exclusive interview between Zuckerberg and Fox anchor Dana Perino.)

Even worse, the social media giant has actively worked with far-right outlets to run its news and fact-checking programs. Last year, Facebook partnered with far-right haven of misinformation Breitbart as a trusted partner for Facebook News. And Facebook has continued to allow one of The Daily Caller’s subsidiaries to participate in its independent fact-checking program, despite the right-wing website continuing to receive money from Trump and GOP groups.

At another point in the interview, Zuckerberg claims that he believes the site’s moderation policies are set and applied “evenly and fairly” to all users. But this is another lie.

In August, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook had repeatedly sidestepped its own policies to intervene “exclusively” on behalf of conservative publishers by removing fact checks from right-wing content found to be false by the company’s independent fact-checking partners. The Facebook pages for far-right media figures and groups such as Breitbart, Diamond and Silk, Charlie Kirk, and PragerU all benefited from Facebook’s internal help. Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy and a former member of President George W. Bush’s administration, was reported to have been involved in this operation. Facebook reportedly fired one employee who collected evidence of the preferential treatment the platform gave exclusively to conservative pages.

Since 2016, Facebook has taken an increasingly conservative bent, with much of the internal activism reportedly the result of Kaplan and Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections and former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee. In January, Facebook hired former Fox & Friendssenior producer Jennifer Williams to head video strategy for Facebook News, joining the company’s extensive staff of former figures from right-wing media and Republican politics. In February, The Washington Post published a bombshell report detailing some of their behind-the-scenes conservative advocacy at Facebook.

Zuckerberg may disagree with the characterization of Facebook as a right-wing echo chamber, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Conservatives are thriving on Facebook, and they’re able to do this thanks to inconsistently applied policy enforcement, internal ideological advocacy, and general right-wing favoritism.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-operative-says-hes-building-system-to-dispatch-protesters-where-ballots-are-counted/

republican political operative Ali Alexander, who previously went by the name ​Ali Akbar, is floating the possibility of revamping a 2018 effort to discredit mail-in and absentee voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

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​According to a 2018 Politico report, the night before the 2016 election, ​a PAC advised by Alexander received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer​, the pro-Trump billionaire. Alexander has associated with far-right figures includingUnite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, ​according to The Observer.

In a Periscope broadcast uploaded Monday—viewed 51,000 times as of Friday morning​—Alexander claimed he planned to revamp a November 2018 effort called “Stop the Steal” and create a digital text-messaging database ​that would dispatch supporters of President Donald Trump to places where ballots are being counted​ as well as ​the offices of state ​election officials around the country if their “physical presence is needed.” Alexander emphasized that his intention is that the protests would be peaceful and ​suggested that anyone who ​attend​s such protests with intentions of being violent would not be​ considered part of his cause.

“In the next coming days, we’re going to build the infrastructure to stop the steal,” Alexander said. “What we are going to do is we’re going to bypass all of social media. In the coming days, we will launch an effort concentrating on the swing states, and we will map out where the votes are being counted and the secretary of states. We will map all of this out for everyone publicly and we will collect cell phone numbers so that way if you are within 100 mile radius of a bad secretary of state or someone who’s counting votes after the deadline or if there’s a federal court hearing, we will alert you of where to go. We’re going to bypass all of Twitter, all of Facebook, all of Instagram, OK? We’re going to bypass it all.”

“We will camp out if we need to​,” Alexander added. ​”We will have tents. We will have water. We will have electrolytes. We will have vitamin D, C, and A. We will have zinc. We will have sandwiches. We will have everything so that patriots can oversee the supposed people in our republic who are tasked with counting our votes, not making it. Counting our votes, not making new votes.”

Right Wing Watch attempted to reach Alexander by text message and Twitter direct message for comment on this story and in hopes Alexander would produce proof that his claimed database was being built. (Alexander has a history of making dubious claims.) We did not receive a response prior to publication.

One America News Network personality and far-right collaborator Jack Posobiec, who operates in the same digital space as Alexander, tweeted Monday: “#StopTheSteal 2020 is coming…”

Right Wing Watch reported in 2018 ​about an effort orchestrated against a ballot recount in the Florida race ​for U.S. Senate between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson by associates of GOP operative and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. In a burst of protests reminiscent of the chaos during the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, pro-Trump activists from around the country descended into Florida to protest and spread disinformation alleging that recount procedures were part of a Democratic plot to commit voter fraud. That election ultimately triggered two recounts and a wave of legal battles; Scott narrowly defeated Nelson by a fraction of a percent. In 2018, Alexander said he was recruiting people experiencing homelessness and ​followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory to fill spots at protests.

In this week’s broadcast, Alexander claimed that the election is being “raped and raided” by Democrats​, and accused Republican leaders and pro-Trump voices ​of sitting idle.

“I’m watching a bunch of grifters, MAGA grifters, pretend like they’re going to stop the steal. Are they going to stop the steal?” Alexander said. “What are these grifters doing online, tweeting, to stop the steal? What have they done in the past? Not a damn thing.”

Alexander said his announcements were spurred by comments Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to Axios about his platform’s policies to deter political candidates from declaring a premature election victory. Zuckerberg said that Americans may not know who the next president will be on election night, a likely scenario due to expected increases in mail-in and absentee voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that Facebook would try to moderate against the organizing of civil unrest on its platform.

“One of the things that I think we and other media need to start doing is preparing the American people that there’s nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days, or even weeks to make sure that all of the votes are counted,” Zuckerberg told Axios. “In fact, that might be important to make sure that this is a legitimate and fair election.”

The new Facebook policy statement includes the following measure: “If any candidate or campaign tries to declare victory before the final results are in, we’ll add a label to their posts directing people to the official results from Reuters and the National Election Pool.” It also states that Facebook will label content “that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud.”

Tags: Ali Akbar Election 2020

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/

a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,” has blown the lid offFacebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.

In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders.Facebook had tagged these leaders internally as promoting “hate speech” and “dangerous” and with the potential to cause, as Purnell and Horwitz write, “real-world violence.” The reason Das reportedly gave for letting these violations of Facebook’s policy go unpunished was that such action would harm Facebook’s business in India.

Facebook also has recently invested $5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the largest investments ever by any tech company for a minority stake. The largest number of Facebook and WhatsApp users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million users. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose rules of engagement are completely opaque. Even more than Facebook, WhatsApp has been the major social media platform for the BJP and its troll army to spread disinformation, as it was for President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell wrote that Facebook has subsequently come under attack internally for its failure to address violations of its hate speech policy in India: “Facebook employees are pressing the company’s leadership to review its handling of hate speech in India, saying [in a letter addressed to ‘FB Leadership’ that] the company has tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures."

this is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed. In a 2017 article for Bloomberg, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote that Facebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of ‘troll armies’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.” They also wrote that “a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.” In 2018, a five-article series for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.

The August 14 WSJ article identified three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and to shoot Rohingyas, Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ reported that after it asked Facebook about some of Singh’s and Hegde’s posts, “Facebook deleted some of… them” and “said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge.” Similarly, “Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about… [Hegde’s] ‘Corona Jihad’ posts.”) Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi, for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These three were among BJP figures flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries including the United States.

The WSJ coverage may make us believe that the problem in Facebook is an individual’s fault, that of Ankhi Das, its policy head for India. The real issue goes far deeper. The power of digital monopolies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—is not merely determined by their wealth. The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media under capitalism, but also in terms of influence. The greater the engagement that you can generate, the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following. Purnell and Horwitz reported that “within two months of the video of the speech” by Kapil Mishra—in which he incited physical violence in clearing protesters—“being posted, the engagement for Mr. Mishra’s Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.”

Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a social role and therefore needs to be regulated for public good.The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, has a code that the press is expected to follow. In the U.S., cross-holdings between different kinds of media are regulated.

There are two issues we need to recognize. The first is that the media is not just any other business but is important for democracy. And the second is that monopoly by itself is also a danger to democracy. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis is widely quoted to have said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly were cited in the congressional hearing in July with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is nearly $5 trillion. If we compare this to the GDPs of entire countries, they come out above Germany, and behind only the U.S., China and Japan. It is this market power that gives them the ability to bend, or in the case of weaker economies, twist out of shape, their legal and regulatory structures.

Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society. This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as 98.5percentof its income is from advertisements. Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts and engagement are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did, that hate and fake news posts drive virality, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts. While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and therefore it feeds off hate and fake news. An internal study had found that64percentof members who had joined extremist groups did so thanks to Facebook’s recommendation tools.

This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. Google’s search engine has shown similar problems, as has its image recognition algorithms. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the leader in spreading hate politics and fake news in the world.

What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and WhatsApp in their campaigns.Though we have seen the phenomena of troll TV—Fox News in the U.S. and Republic TV in India—penetrating the traditional media space, WhatsApp and Facebook have been the primary playground of trolls, aided by Facebook’s algorithms. While it may seem that the right understands digital platforms better than others, and that is why it has had so much success with them, there is increasing evidence that the support that Facebook provides to various right-wing figures and hate speech is not an accident but a part of its strategy.

In the language of new tech, hate speech is not a bug in the systems of social media but a basic feature. The problem of hate speech cannot be solved by politely petitioning the Zuckerbergs of digital monopoly platforms to behave more responsibly. It needs, at the very least, breaking up their monopolies and regulating them as public utilities.

Prabir Purkayasthais the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/report-facebook-employees-have-evidence-showing-pattern-preferential-treatment-right-wing

A new BuzzFeed report reveals that Facebook employees have evidence that shows the platform gives preferential treatment to right-wing Facebook pages, which is at stark odds with conservatives’ frequent and unsubstantiated claims that social media platforms are censoring right-wing accounts.

An August 6 article from Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac reports that there are growing internal concerns about how Facebook handles misinformation, particularly misinformation related to voting and the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

In internal message boards, employees questioned “the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages” including the far-right outlet Breitbart, which Facebook considers a “trusted new source.” Reportedly, employees have evidence that shows “a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages,” including interference in Facebook’s fact-checking process from company leaders such as FacebookVice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, a former deputy White House chief of staff for the George W. Bush administration, reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups and was involved in nixing proposed solutions to stop political polarization on the platform.

This reporting comes as right-wing politicians and figures continue to baselessly accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of censorship and anti-conservative bias. During the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing last month, conservative lawmakers repeatedly alleged that Facebook is biased against right-leaning content. Additionally, Fox News attacked Facebook and accused the platform of censorship after Facebook enforced its policy against COVID-19 misinformation.

Media Matters has repeatedly found that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms are false. In multiple studies over the course of several years, Media Matters has shown that right-leaning and left-leaning content thrives on Facebook, with right-leaning Facebook pages earning more interactions -- reactions, comments, shares -- on posts about voting and posts about protests against police brutality than do posts from left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages. In recent weeks, this trend has continued to hold.

BuzzFeed’s latest report about Facebook employees claiming there is a pattern of preferential treatment toward right-leaning Facebook pages and figures further underscores how Facebook has caved to pressure from conservatives, despite evidence repeatedly debunking conservatives’ baseless accusations. From BuzzFeed’s August 6 article:

With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question, but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company's news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don't have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make sense to remove them.”

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

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Facebook is “aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. “They have become the vehicle for climate misinformation, and thus should be held partially responsible for a lack of action on climate change.”

Brulle was reacting to Facebook’s recent decision, made at the request of climate science deniers, to create a giant loophole in its fact-checking program. Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company’s third-party fact-checking program.

But now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it “opinion.”

The organization that requested the change, the CO2 Coalition, is celebrating, E&E news reported on Monday. The group, which has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, says its views on climate change are increasingly ignored by the mainstream media. Now it plans to use Facebook to aggressively push climate misinformation on the public—without having to worry about fact checks from climate scientists.

How it all started

A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that “climate models” were a “failure” that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook.

There was just one issue: It wasn’t true.

This is exactly the kind of mess that Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers is supposed to solve. In May 2019, Facebook partnered with Science Feedback, a site dedicated to explaining “why information is or is not consistent with the science.” Science Feedback’s process is extremely rigorous. Each piece has multiple reviewers, and each reviewer “holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals.”

Five scientists reviewed the Washington Examiner article for Science Feedback. The scientists identified a number of problems with the piece: “false factual assertions, cherry-picking datasets that support their point, failing to account for uncertainties in those datasets, and failing to assess the performance of climate models in an objective and rigorous manner.” The article was rated “false” by Science Feedback and logged in Facebook’s system.

That should have been the end of the story. The Washington Examiner article should have had a warning overlaid each time it was shared on Facebook, and its distribution on Facebook should have been dramatically reduced.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, an organization affiliated with Michaels, the CO2 Coalition, wrote Zuckerberg and complained about Science Feedback’s rating. Among other things, the coalition claims that Science Feedback’s analysis amounted to “simple differences of opinion.” The coalition asked Zuckerberg to “remove Facebook’s censorship, labeling, and restrictions on this article.”

Amazingly, it worked. In September, Facebook removed the false rating, overruling the judgment of Science Feedback. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook found that the misinformation about climate models was an “opinion” and, therefore, not eligible for fact-checking.

Now, the CO2 Coalition has announced its intention to exploit this loophole to spread climate misinformation on Facebook.

How Facebook’s fact-checking program is supposed to work

The rules for Facebook’s fact-checking program are clear. Facebook does not conduct the fact-checks itself. Instead, it has outsourced the process to third parties that are certified by Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network.

If a publisher has a dispute about a rating it receives on Facebook, it should “reach out directly to the third-party fact-checking organizations.” The rating can only be removed by the organization that issued the fact check — either because the fact checker is convinced by the publisher’s dispute or the publisher corrected the false information. There is no mechanism to appeal a fact-check directly to Facebook.

According to Facebook’s rules, all “public, newsworthy Facebook and Instagram posts, including ads, with articles, photos, or videos,” are eligible for fact-checking. The only type of content that is listed as exempt is original content posted by politicians or political candidates.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, after receiving the complaint from the CO2 coalition, Facebook planned to create a new rule exempting “opinion pieces” from fact-checking. But Facebook did not “respond to requests for comment” on the new rule. No such rule has been publicly acknowledged by Facebook in the months that followed.

In response to a request for comment, Facebook did little to clarify the situation, reiterating the company’s official fact-checking policies but not addressing its decision to overrule Science Feedback. “The focus of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program is combating viral misinformation,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said. “There’s an appeals process in place for publishers to appeal directly to fact-checkers to dispute ratings.”

How climate science deniers plan to exploit Facebook’s loophole

Creating an unwritten exemption for “opinion” content, which is enforced by Facebook and not its fact-checking partners, creates a giant loophole for misinformation. The CO2 coalition told E&E News that they plan to exploit it.

After the quiet decision by Facebook, the coalition says it and other groups that attack consensus climate science can share content that climate scientists have labeled as misleading because Facebook will consider it “opinion” and therefore immune to fact-checking.

The CO2 Coalition is increasingly focused on using Facebook to reach more people with its message that climate change fears are overblown and that burning more fossil fuels would help humanity, Executive Director Caleb Rossiter told E&E News this week. He sees the battle over its climate-related posts as part of a larger proxy war over how to reach an audience outside of conservative media.

Rossiter said Facebook was increasingly important because “the mainstream media” is no longer willing to amplify the group’s opinions. But the reason the “mainstream media” is not willing to amplify the group’s opinions is because they’re not opinions at all. They’re falsehoods.

Climate facts are not climate opinions

Andrew Dessler is one of the five climate scientists who originally fact-checked the CO2 Coalition’s op-ed by Pat Michaels. It was “complete bullshit,” he said. “We gave it a bad review, which it 100 percent deserved.”

The article claimed computer models used by climate scientists to predict warming have proved overblown, and thus shouldn’t be trusted. To prove it, Michaels compared “actual temperatures since 1979 with what the 32 families of climate models used in the latest U.N. report on climate science predicted they would be.”

The comparison was flawed. Michaels compared the earth’s present temperature with past climate models that predicted more carbon pollution than actually occurred. If we had polluted as much as the models predicted, the world would have warmed as much as the models predicted.

We know this because actual climate scientists have published research assessing the accuracy of climate models. That research, which went through the rigorous peer-review process, says computer climate models have been largely accurate for the last 40 years. Michaels’ analysis, on the other hand, didn’t go through any peer-review process, nor is Michaels climate scientist himself. What Michaels did was amateur Google sleuthing. What the scientists did was science.

Dessler thinks Michaels should be able to state his opinions about climate change without getting fact-checked. “Things like, ‘we should [implement] a carbon tax,’ or ‘subsidize nuclear energy, or even ‘we shouldn’t do anything about climate change,'” he said. “Those aren’t facts; they’re policy choices.”

But statements about the physical condition of the planet; the effect of carbon on the atmosphere; the historical accuracy of climate models—those are scientific in nature. “Those are not opinions,” Dessler said. “They’re either true or false.”

“The earth is warming. Climate models have done a good job,” he added. “That should be covered by fact-checking.”

The dire consequences of not fact-checking climate denial

The CO2 Coalition told E&E News that it is getting assistance from a “‘conservative’ Facebook employee.” Facebook says that claim is not true, but did not specify who at Facebook reversed Science Feedback’s ruling.

American political conservatives have a long, well-documented history of perpetuating climate disinformation in order to delay climate action. Disinformation—that is, the intentional spread of misinformation—has been a key strategy of the fossil fuel industry and its political allies for decades. The less people understand about climate science, the strategy goes, the less likely they will be to support aggressive climate policies, which threaten the fossil fuel industry’s immense profitability.

The CO2 Coalition’s use of Facebook’s op-ed loophole “fits right back into that strategy of trying to promulgate misinformation to the public in order to keep alive the lack of public concern over climate change, to stop meaningful action to address it,” Brulle said. And by having the loophole, Brulle said, “Facebook is becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution, to climate change.”

Naomi Oreskes, an acclaimed Harvard University professor who co-wrote “Merchants of Doubt,” agreed that Facebook’s op-ed loophole is “potentially very damaging.”

“We know that many people, particularly young people, are getting their information heavily, or even primarily, from social media,” she said. “For social media to propagate disinformation, without any attempt at screening, is for them to become, in effect, part of the disinformation machine

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/silicon-valley-rips-off-the-mask-as-tech-ceos-veer-right-amid-political-turmoil/

karlis

The times are a-changing in Silicon Valley. Once a reliable bastion of libertarianism from the CEOs at the top to the workers at the bottom, new schisms are forming between the workers and the owners — from white-collar software engineers unionizing at Kickstarter to Googlers and Amazon workers publicly denouncing their executives.

This article firstappeared in Salon.

Yet as employees have begun to wake up to the many ways in which their employers exploited them in exchange for nap pods and free snacks, the titans of industry themselves appear to be showing their true colors. The pandemic prompted mass layoffs and swift changes in policy for many tech titans; yet coupled with the anti-police racism protests, we are starting to see the far-right soul of Silicon Valley’s leaders — belying the stereotype of technology as synonymous with progressivism.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, profited tremendously off the pandemic, seeing his wealth rise $30 billion. Yet his empire still saw fit to stop paying a $2 an hour hazard pay bonus to its warehouse workers — a high-risk job. Putting them at risk has resulted in a lawsuit from warehouse workers, claiming the company put their families at risk.

amazon continues to try and position itself as a progressive company, unlike other big corporations. Recently, Amazon tried to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by _{tweeting}_ “the inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop. Together we stand in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.”

There was a tinge of irony to the statement, given the company’s history of enabled authoritarian surveillance. To that end, the American Civil Liberties Union quickly replied: “Cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling _{face recognition surveillance}_ technology that supercharges police abuse?”

Bezos isn’t the only CEO who treats his workers with utter disregard for safety or health. Tesla Inc. In mid-May, CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he was defying Alameda County shelter-in-place order and restarting production at the Alameda County Tesla factory, which employs more than 10,000 people. On his Twitter account, Musk said he will be “on the [assembly] line with everyone else,” and stated that he was willing to be arrested for the noble “cause” of restarting production. Musk filed a lawsuit against Alameda County for injunctive relief and threatened to take his factory to another state, then took a jab at the Alameda County’s interim health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, whom Musk called “ignorant.”

Previously, Musk expressed repeated disdain for the virus or the potential for a pandemic (i.e. “the coronavirus panic is dumb“) mirroring much of the American right, who value economic activity over lives and pivoted their politics to that effect, in defiance of scientific evidence and models.

The Trumpian head-in-sand attitude coming from Musk is unsurprising. As I’ve written before, Musk and Trump have much in common: they’re both entitled, wealthy businessmen who profit off the backs of a vast underclass — which is why Musk played the victim card when his factory couldn’t operate during shelter-in-place.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has shown bitter resistance in the face of evidence that his platform has become a fount of disinformation around both the coronavirus and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. In _{an interview}_ with Fox News last week, Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t believe social media platforms should become the “arbiter of truth”.

“We have a different policy than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg said in comments that first aired Wednesday. “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies, or especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

The comments mirror his attitude in 2017, when he commented on Facebook’s role in fomenting political disinformation amid the 2016 election. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way — I think that is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said then. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

Zuckerberg’s attitude towards the role of social media in serving as an arbiter of truth differs from his peers at Snapchat and, recently, Twitter, which made an about-face in its policies around Trump’s sophistic tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey fired back at Zuckerberg: “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make. This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”

Zuckerberg’s inaction with regard to censoring or labeling Trump’s misinformation has led up to unprecedented internal actions this week, l_{ike employees staging a virtual walkout.}_ Facebook employees are notorious for their fealty to their CEO; internal leaks or dissent were rare, until recently.

They say the bad times bring out the best in people. In that case, it’s certainly worth examining why Silicon Valley’s overlords appear to be a notable exception.

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aha evil meme/  conspir can originate in fever swmp of qanon and 4chan, but needs a signal boost eg jones, and must make it to facebook to really go viral?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/ashamed-to-work-here-dozens-of-facebook-employees-protest-mark-zuckerbergs-hands-off-approach-to-inflammatory-trump-posts/

no lnx pix...

Ashamed to work here’: Dozens of Facebook employees protest Mark Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to ‘inflammatory’ Trump posts

Mark Zuckerberg gives testimony to Congress.

Written by Alex Henderson June 1, 2020

While Twitter has been fact-checking some of President Donald Trump’s tweets recently — much to his chagrin — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been as proactive when it comes to posts by the president and his allies. And some Facebook employees, according to New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac, are not happy about it.

Frenkel and Issac report that on Monday, June 1, dozens of Facebook employees “protested executives’ decision not to do anything about inflammatory posts that President Trump had placed on the giant social media platform over the last week.”

“The employees, who took the day off by logging into Facebook’s systems and requesting time off to support protesters across the country, also added an automated message to their e-mails saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest,” according to the Times reporters. Taking the day off, they observe, is a “virtual ‘walkout’ of sorts” for the Facebook workers.

Trump’s critics have been arguing that Facebook needs to do a lot more fact-checking of his posts, which is what Twitter is now doing: Twitter has flagged some of the president’s tweets for possible inaccuracy, although without actually removing them. But at Facebook, Frenkel and Issac note, Zuckerberg has maintained more of “hands-off approach to what people post” — including Trump — and while Twitter has “acted on Mr. Trump’s tweets,” Facebook has “left them alone.”

Zuckerberg has asserted that while he, personally, finds some of Trump’s posts objectionable, he won’t remove them for that reason.

On May 29, Zuckerberg was critical of some inflammatory Trump tweets, writing, “Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric. But I’m responsible for reacting not just in my personal capacity, but as the leader of an institution committed to free expression.”

Zuckerberg was specifically referring to a controversial tweet in which Trump wrote, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” — a phrase that, infamously, was used in 1967 by the controversial Miami Police Chief Walter Headley and in 1968 by segregationist George Wallace (who ran for president that year on an unapologetically pro-segregation platform).

Donald J. Trump

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@realDonaldTrump

· May 28, 2020

I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.....

Donald J. Trump

?

@realDonaldTrump

....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

83.7K

9:53 PM - May 28, 2020

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It was also on May 29 that Facebook engineer Lauren Tan tweeted, “Facebook’s inaction in taking down Trump’s post inciting violence makes me ashamed to work here. Silence is complicity.”

Lauren Tan ????

@sugarpirate_

Facebook's inaction in taking down Trump's post inciting violence makes me ashamed to work here. I absolutely disagree with it. I enjoy the technical parts of my job and working alongside smart/kind people, but this isn't right. Silence is complicity.

1,970

1:46 PM - May 29, 2020

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491 people are talking about this

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-hypocrite-and-trumpist

Facebook CEO knew what he was doing wading into the president’s latest tantrum

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 05/28/20 2:11 PM EDT

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think social media companies should be arbiters of truth. He’s full of shit.

In an interview with Fox News anchor Dana Perino, the Facebook founder and CEO chided Twitter for its decision to add a fact check to one of President Donald Trump’s tweets containing an unhinged conspiracy theory about rampant voter fraud. According to Zuckerberg, that’s not the kind of thing Facebook would do because the social media company is committed to free speech and letting people judge for themselves whether politicians are telling the truth. But as is so often the case when it comes to the Silicon Valley billionaires guiding our digital lives, he’s not being entirely honest about how Facebook has handled the Trump era.

Let’s review the simple truth about Zuckerberg: He’s a hypocrite and a Trumpist. It might seem Facebook has followed this “free speech” approach in turning a blind eye to Trump’s many lies, but  he's shown he’s more than willing to be an “arbiter of truth” for others. Facebook does fact-check posts, and it does limit their reach and flag violations based on what third-party fact-checkers determine -- but it has also carved out a Trump-sized exemption for politicians. Prior to an October change to Facebook’s advertising rules on false information, Trump had been repeatedly violating its policies without facing consequences. That October policy change exempted politicians on the advertising side of things, as well.

Statements from politicians are exempt from fact-checking on Facebook except for two specific areas: misleading posts about the U.S. Census and voting. “Attempts to interfere with or suppress voting undermine our core values as a company, and we work proactively to remove this type of harmful content,” reads an October Facebook blog post on content that may suppress votes. “We remove this type of content regardless of who it’s coming from.” This was later clarified on Facebook’s blog post about census misinformation, specifying that “as with voter interference, content that violates our census interference policy will not be allowed to remain on our platforms as newsworthy even if posted by a politician.”

In March, Facebook briefly allowed the Trump campaign to run ads that violated its census interference policy before changing course. According to a Media Matters analysis earlier this month, the Trump campaign published at least 529 Facebook ads with false claims of voter fraud in just two days, which it shouldn’t have received exemptions to do under Facebook’s voter suppression rule.

Facebook is extremely comfortable being the “arbiters of truth,” so long as “truth” matches what Trump and pro-Trump groups say

In 2019, after an anti-abortion group posted videos on Facebook claiming that “abortion is never medically necessary,” a fact check from medical professionals marked that as false. But after right-wing media outlets and several Republican senators complained that this accurate fact check was a form of censorship, Facebook removed it. Even after another third-party entity reviewed the issue and cleared Facebook of “any systemic bias,” Facebook did not reapply its fact checks.

In March, an offshoot of Fox host Tucker Carlson’s conservative outlet The Daily Caller used its fact-checking status on Facebook to get an unflattering post about the president marked as false and downranked. After Trump claimed that Democratic concern about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak and potential for it to take on pandemic status was a “hoax,” Check Your Fact swooped in to get a Politico post about his comments marked as “false information.”

Earlier this month, The Lincoln Project, a group of “Never Trump” Republicans, released critical of Trump. After the president worked himself into a fury over the video on Twitter, Facebook rejected it as an ad and buried the organically uploaded version of the clip under a “partly false” label. It was so labeled because of its claim that “Donald Trump bailed out Wall Street but not Main Street” in the CARES Act. The thinking here apparently goes that because the bill did some good for “Main Street,” it was false enough for Facebook to reject it.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran an ad calling for the break-up of Facebook, Amazon, and Google, Facebook removed the post. After proving Warren’s point, Facebook reinstated the ads.

For years, Zuckerberg and Facebook have been making increasingly obvious overtures to conservatives, even bringing on Republican operatives to help them craft policy.

In 2017, in an effort to address the flood of false news being shared before the 2016 election, Facebook announced fact-checking partnerships with The Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes. Conservatives immediately complained, falsely claiming that these mainstream news organizations were somehow “left-wing” and “liberal” partisans, with The Daily Caller claiming that Snopes was engaged in “outright lying in service of a liberal narrative.” Facebook responded to this criticism from the right by adding The Weekly Standard, an explicitly partisan conservative publication with a lengthy track record of spreading misinformation, as a fact-checker. Check Your Fact, an extension of The Daily Caller, was later added as another.

In 2018, after conservatives baselessly complained about supposed “anti-conservative bias” on Facebook, the site hired former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl to audit the platform. Kyl’s eventual report was a flop, but it showed just how easily Zuckerberg is goaded to adopt conservatives’ framing on any given issue.

In October, Popular Information’s Judd Legum reported on Facebook’s embrace of the right. “Everyone in power is a Republican,” a former Facebook employee in the company’s D.C. office told Legum. “Decisions are made to benefit Republicans because they are paranoid about their reputation among conservative Republicans, particularly Trump.”

To say “everyone in power is a Republican” didn’t actually turn out to be much of a stretch. Facebook Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, the man who reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups like The Daily Caller and Breitbart, is a former deputy White House chief of staff for George W. Bush. Vice President for U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin is another former member of the George W. Bush administration, serving at the Federal Communications Commission. Public Policy Director for Global Elections Katie Harbath is a longtime Republican operative and former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee.

Zuckerberg is not being duped by the right-wing; he’s part of it.

It’s telling that Zuckerberg’s first instinct was to side with Trump in his latest Twitter tirade and run to Fox News to defend the decision. It’s not surprising, but it’s telling all the same.

Fox News is where Trump will be sure to see him, and Zuckerberg is pandering to his audience of one.

In October, Zuckerberg met secretly with Trump for dinner at the White House. It’s anybody’s guess what the two of them discussed, but there’s only so much time one can devote to telling Trump that he’s “No. 1 on Facebook.”

Last year, Politico reported that Zuckerberg had connected quietly with conservative commentators, media executives, and politicians in a series of private meetings. Those of us on the outside should see this for what it is. As persistent as the Silicon Valley liberal stereotype is, this isn’t Zuckerberg meeting with his ideological opposites. This is Zuckerberg in his element, with his friends, getting ready to reelect the president. That’s who Mark Zuckerberg is, and it’s why he’s been giving Trump a pass this whole time.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4673

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter

twt vi9d]

although President Donald Trump has used Twitter incessantly to promote himself, he has been furious with the social media outlet this week for fact-checking two of his tweets — so furious that on Thursday, he issued an executive order targeting social media companies and claimed that he did so to “defend free speech.” Twitter hasn’t removed any of Trump’s tweets, but flagged or hidden them as inaccurate or violent. While legal scholars have been asserting that the order cannot withstand legal scrutiny, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz stresses that it serves a useful purpose for Trump nonetheless — and that purpose has been identified by the “notoriously stupid” Fox News host Steve Doocy.

“President Donald Trump capped off a multi-day tantrum at Twitter for appending a mild fact-check to one of his false tweets by retaliating with the power of the federal government,” Gertz explains. “The executive order he signed Thursday is slapdash and incoherent, rooted in a false premise, hypocritical and potentially unconstitutional, legally unenforceable yet dangerously authoritarian, with sections that read like a Fox News screed. But to analyze the executive order’s flaws is to miss the point entirely.”

That purpose, according to Gertz, is “raising the cost of defiance until his perceived enemies break” — and the executive order “forces Twitter to expend resources fighting it, but if the company bends to Trump and does what he wants, maybe it will just go away.”

“Steve Doocy of all people — the notoriously stupid ‘Fox & Friends’ host who is one of the president’s favorite cable news personalities — (inadvertently) nailed it on Wednesday,” Gertz notes. “Social media companies would face ‘a big headache’ if Trump tried to repeal the section of federal law that the executive order targets, he exclaimed, so ‘they might think twice about putting a footnote on a tweet from the president of the United States.’”

Gertz emphasizes that with his executive order, Trump is “drawing a line between companies that defy him and are punished and those that work to benefit him and receive praise.” Trump, Gertz observes, “lauded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for criticizing Twitter’s decision to fact-check him.”

“Zuckerberg is the poster child for what Trump wants from the head of a social media company,” according to Gertz. “The Republican political operatives he hired to run Facebook’s policy wing have carved out exemptions from the site’s rules for Trump and his media allies. Trump is making clear that it is in the interests of other social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube to adopt that same corporate strategy — and he will continue to raise the temperature until they do.”

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mma 220 omg

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intersting that upstart punk nerds buy gravitas in architecture?

Apple, Facebook face off over posh NYC office space: sources

https://nypost.com › 2019/10/15 › apple-facebook-face-off-over-posh-nyc...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Oct 15, 2019 - Mark :{Zuckerberg's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Facebook is facing off with Tim Cook's Apple over posh ... James A. Farley :{Post Office:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: across from MSG, The Post has learned.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-and-facebook-are-willing-participants-trumps-reelection-campaign

==

Facebook has admitted that CEO Mark Zuckerberg secretly met with President Donald Trump over dinner at the White House in October. Also at the meeting was Facebook investor Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and chair of the data technology company Palantir, a defense contractor whose case management system is used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to surveil, track and deport immigrants. It’s not clear what Thiel, Zuckerberg and Trump discussed. Massachusetts Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “This is how the government keeps working for giant corporations and the wealthy and well-connected. It’s no wonder that companies like Facebook have been allowed to consolidate economic and political power without any real accountability.”

===

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go back to October, when New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Did anyone on your leadership team know about Cambridge Analytica prior to the initial report by The Guardian on December 11, 2015?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I believe so, in that some folks were tracking it internally.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And —

MARK ZUCKERBERG: I’m actually — as you’re asking this, I do think I was aware of Cambridge Analytica as an entity earlier. I just — I don’t know if I was tracking how they were using Facebook specifically.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: When was the issue discussed with your board member Peter Thiel?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I don’t — I don’t know that offhand.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: You don’t know. This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t — you don’t know?

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s AOC, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, questioning Jeffrey [sic] Zuckerberg. Brittany Kaiser, was he telling the truth?

BRITTANY KAISER: I have found that during multiple rounds of questioning, that he —

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Zuckerberg, that is.

BRITTANY KAISER: — that Mark Zuckerberg continues to deny the amount of strategies that he is aware of, the amount of data abuses that he is aware of. And just saying that “My team will get back to you,” without being honest with the public, is a massive disaster, not only for his own PR, but for our democracies and for moving forward in a productive manner.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Ocasio-Cortez was getting at when she was talking about Peter Thiel.

BRITTANY KAISER: So, Peter Thiel, as far as I am aware, was the head of Trump’s technology advisory council. There were multiple meetings where Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was either being invited or attempting to be invited to those meetings, through the Mercers, through Kellyanne Conway, through Steve Bannon.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were with Rebekah Mercer, right, on Trump inauguration night?

BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. The Mercers and a lot of other people who had played a very large role in the funding and in the campaigning for Donald Trump were reaching as far as they possibly could to technology tools in order to achieve their goals.

zuck?

one of our nation's most popular federal agencies is at-risk of being privatized by the Trump administration. In June 2018, the White House announced proposals to privatize the Postal Service. Now, with the current Postmaster General Megan Brennan announcing her departure effective January 2020 - the possibility is becoming increasingly more real.

With the imminent departure of the current Postmaster General, there is a growing danger that the Trump administration would jump at the opportunity to select someone to replace Brennan who is willing to take the initial steps towards privatization.

With the Postmaster General's wide powers to shape the mission of the USPS, Brennan's successor could hand over parts of the service to private, for-profit making corporations and prepare it for a wholesale sell-off.

==

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Facebook :{CEO:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel Had Secret White House Dinner with Trump

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/twitter-bans-political-advertisements-jack-dorsey-905957/

no lnx

twitter Says It Will No Longer Run Political Advertisements, Trolls Facebook

“This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach.”

By RYAN BORT

[Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey leaves after his talk with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in ParisTwitter, Paris, France - 07 Jun 2019

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Wednesday that the platform will no longer host political advertisements, a major shift in the social media giant’s policy ahead of the 2020 elections. “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally,” he wrote. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

jack ??????

?

@jack

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…??

Dorsey posted a lengthy explanation of his rationale, threaded over several additional tweets. “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” he wrote. “Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money. While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

The announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of how social media platforms regulate political advertisements. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struggled to explain his platform’s policy while testifying before Congress, indicating that political advertisements will not be fact-checked. “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves,” Zuckerberg said when asked by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) whether Facebook will take down political advertisements that contain false information.

Dorsey appeared to throw in a jab at Zuckerberg in his explanation of Twitter’s decision. “[I]t‘s not credible for us to say: ‘We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!” he wrote, throwing in a winking emoji

...

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dismantled by the squad, katie p ca

facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a false answer during a congressional hearing before the House Financial Services Committee when asked about a division of right-wing website The Daily Caller being involved in Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asked Zuckerberg why a division of The Daily Caller is included in the Facebook fact-checking project given the publication has many ties to white supremacists. Zuckerberg demurred on the question of Facebook’s role, and instead claimed that a third party was responsible for appointing the fact-checkers.

That claim is false. Facebook requires its partners to be accredited by the organization, but it is Facebook who decides which organizations they use in the fact-checking project. And yet, Zuckerberg repeated this falsehood during a follow-up question.

Breitbart in the Facebook News tab: As if that wasn't bad enough, Facebook announced its new "news tab" this week. While the company refused to release a full list of news organizations who are participating, it did announce that Breitbart was part of it.

Breitbart is certainly a disreputable website known for spreading misinformation. For example, in 2017, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief admitted that the website’s all-in defense of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was not a product of any news judgment about whether Moore had been accurately accused of child molestation, but instead was a political calculation meant to protect President Donald Trump against reports of his own sexual misconduct. When Breitbart petitioned for a permanent Senate press credential, it could not prove that it was editorially independent.

What stands out most in Breitbart’s inclusion in Facebook News is the supposed prohibition on hate speech. Breitbart has a long history with hate speech, including letting neo-Nazis ghostwrite articles. That is not an exaggeration, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

When pressed about Breitbart's inclusion, Zuckerberg claimed that the news tab needs a "diversity" of views. It's just another standard BS answer that panders to the right - something that all of Facebook's executives are extremely well-practiced at by now.

Also: It turns out that Breitbart is also in Apple News.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-spread-misinformation-about-facebooks-fact-checking-program-during-his

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a false answer when asked during a congressional hearing about a division of right-wing website The Daily Caller being involved in Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.

Zuckerberg deflected Facebook’s responsibility by suggesting an outside entity is in charge of which organizations Facebook uses as fact-checkers. But that isn’t true: Who gets to fact-check on Facebook is decided by Facebook. Additionally, reporting has shown that a Facebook executive previously agitated for The Daily Caller’s inclusion in the fact-checking project.

Zuckerberg appeared before the House Financial Services Committee on October 23 to testify about Facebook’s efforts to launch a new cryptocurrency, how Facebook has been used to post ads that violate federal housing discrimination laws, and other topics related to the company. One of those topics was Facebook’s fact-checking project, which has been maligned for its ineffectiveness.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asked Zuckerberg why a division of The Daily Caller is included in the Facebook fact-checking project given the publication is “well-documented with ties to white supremacists.” Zuckerberg demurred on the question of Facebook’s role, and instead claimed, “We actually don’t appoint the independent fact-checkers, they go through an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network that has a rigorous standard for who they allow to serve as a fact-checker.” That is false. Facebook requires its partners to be accredited by the organization, which is actually called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), but it is Facebook, not IFCN, who decides which organizations Facebook uses in its fact-checking project.

[vid?]

As explained by Vox, “IFCN certification is a necessary condition for partnering with Facebook, but once a site is certified, it’s up to Facebook to decide whether to partner with it. There are currently 62 organizations with IFCN certification globally, but Facebook only partners with six in the United States.”

Judd Legum, who publishes the Popular Information newsletter, asked IFCN about Zuckerberg’s response to Ocasio-Cortez’ question. IFCN Director Baybars Örsek confirmed that Zuckerberg’s claim that IFCN appoints Facebook fact-checkers was false:

Zuckerberg repeated this falsehood during a follow-up question after Ocasio-Cortez asked, “So you would say that white supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking?” Again, Zuckerberg falsely claimed that IFCN, not Facebook, was “assessing that standard” for inclusion in Facebook’s fact-checking project.

In fact, a Facebook executive previously attempted to ensure that The Daily Caller’s fact-checking division, which is called Check Your Fact, was included in Facebook’s fact-checking project. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook executive and former George W. Bush administration official Joel Kaplan started pushing for it to be included in the summer of 2018. But other executives at Facebook were opposed to its inclusion because of falsehoods promoted by The Daily Caller, and debate over the matter ended when Check Your Fact lost its IFCN accreditation in November 2018. But in April, after Check Your Fact regained its IFCN accreditation, it was named as a Facebook fact-checking partner.

In order to be recertified, Check Your Fact had to comply with disclosure requirements about the source of its funding. That disclosure indicated that Check Your Fact is funded via the bigoted Daily Caller's general operating budget, the website's own ad revenue, and a $100,000 grant from The Daily Caller News Foundation that was provided by the right-wing Searle Freedom Trust foundation.

Zuckerberg’s testimony about the project misled Congress and made clear that he may not even be aware of the basic logistics of how Facebook’s fact-checking operation works.

(Disclosure: In March 2018, Check Your Fact fact-checked a claim that I made about the National Rifle Association, rating the claim “true.”)

no lnx

Zucked: Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on how the company became a threat to democracy

Roger McNamee, Screengrab

Written by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now October 23, 2019

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill as his company’s actions face escalating criticism. The focus of today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing is on Facebook’s plan to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra that would reshape the world’s financial system. Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that her probe of Facebook for violating antitrust regulations is now backed by attorneys general from 47 states and territories. Facebook is also facing criticism from several Democratic presidential candidates for refusing to ban political ads from candidates containing false information. We speak with Roger McNamee, a former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and early investor in Facebook, who has since become one of the company’s most vocal critics. His recent book is titled, “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying today on Capitol Hill as his company’s actions face escalating criticism. The focus of today’s House hearing is on Facebook’s plan to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra that could reshape the world’s financial system. Zuckerberg will reportedly tell legislators he supports delaying the launch of Libra until U.S. regulators approve it. According to his prepared remarks, Zuckerberg will say “I believe this is something that needs to get built, but I understand we’re not the ideal messenger right now. I know some people wonder whether we can be trusted to build payment services that protect consumers,” he’s apparently going to say.

Today’s hearing comes as Facebook faces intense scrutiny on a number of grounds. On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that her probe of Facebook for violating antitrust regulations is now backed by attorneys general from 46 other U.S. states and territories. James said the states are “concerned that Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, and increased the price of advertising.”

Facebook is also facing criticism from several Democratic presidential candidates for refusing to ban political ads containing false information. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly called for Facebook and other big tech companies to be broken up on antitrust grounds.

Well, today, we spend the hour with a man who once mentored Mark Zuckerberg and was an early investor in Facebook but has since become one of Facebook’s most vocal critics. Roger McNamee joins us from Pittsburgh. He has been an investor in Silicon Valley for over 35 years. He has advised Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many others. Earlier this year, he published the book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Roger McNamee, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you start off by explaining why you call Facebook a catastrophe?

ROGER MCNAMEE: So Amy, first of all, thank you very much. It is such a privilege to be here on Democracy Now! with you today. So Facebook really simply began its life in a very innocent way, connecting friends to friends and allowing people to share what was going on in their lives. The challenge really developed when the company needed to make money, and so it began creating a business model that was based on effectively monopolizing attention. They sell advertising. They need people to watch the ads. And the way they did that was to use two things—the techniques of slot machines and propaganda that prey on the weakest elements of human psychology, and then they use smartphones, which basically were on people’s bodies 24 hours a day and created the ability to generate first habits and then later addiction.

And Facebook, along with Google and other products like Instagram and YouTube, played this game incredibly effectively. They did so at a time when there really were no rules for businesses. Essentially, the American economy has been deregulating for 40 years, and so there’s nobody watching the store. And smart people take what they can get, and the people at Facebook and Google are really smart, and they basically made a play for a global consumer internet product that would essentially touch everyone around the world and bring them into a single network and manipulate their behavior for profit.

And it has been amazingly successful in economic terms, but it has caused huge harms to democracy, to public health, to privacy and frankly to the structure of the economy itself. In my mind, we have a huge challenge because as users, we really like these products. We like Facebook. We like Instagram. We like YouTube. But we have to learn to accept that things we like can sometimes do great harm to society, and that’s what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain its threat to democracy, Roger.

ROGER MCNAMEE: Very simply put, the way that Facebook works—and the same would be true of Instagram and YouTube and Google search engine—they need you to spend a lot of time. And so the first thing they do is they use notifications to build a habit. Once you’re addicted, once you’re coming back multiple times a day, they have to find ways to keep you on the site. And the simplest way to do that is to reinforce whatever content gets you to share or like or comment. It turns out for most of us, the content that does that is stuff that triggers flight or fight, which is essentially a part of our psychology that is so deeply wired we can’t avoid it. The content that does that best is hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Effectively what happens on Facebook is they bombard you with the stuff you react to, and it blocks out all other forms of communication. So you wind up being in what is called a filter bubble, which is essentially an artificial reality where everything appears to reinforce the things you already like or the things you already believe, and it blocks out any new ideas. And in a democracy, that’s terrible, because it increases polarization. Essentially, each one of us is in our own Truman Show, and if we are not careful, we wind up having our own set of facts.

And you see this every day. I mean, one third of Americans do not believe there is any relationship between human activity and climate change. That is demonstrably false. There’s another 7% or 8% who believe there is a linkage between vaccination and autism, which is clearly not true. Well, in a democracy, if you can’t agree on the facts, you can’t have debate, you can’t have compromise. And Facebook has played a larger role than any other platform at increasing this polarization. They have had a lot of help from YouTube and Instagram, but Facebook has been the one that has done it worst.

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AMY GOODMAN: And why a threat to public health?

ROGER MCNAMEE: So on public health, there’s a bunch of different things going on in public health. Quite obviously, if people live in a fantasy world, if they live in a Truman Show and they are angry all the time, if people are constantly being bombarded with stuff that triggers fear or outrage, that’s just not going to be good for their mental health.

But let’s think about children. You have huge issues on products like Instagram with bullying and body shaming. We have seen a very mysterious but alarming increase in teen suicide and it has been suggested that there may be a link to social media in terms of increasing that pressure at this very vulnerable time in children’s lives. And then obviously, there are products that Facebook has, and that especially Google and Microsoft have, that are aimed at really little kids. So Microsoft has Minecraft, Facebook has Messenger for kids, and Google has Chromebooks and all of their educational products. And those things are designed essentially to train really little kids for this world of surveillance that is so core to the business model of Internet platforms.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to talk about how you came to know Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, what you said to them, your advice, the direction they’re going in today, the significance of his testifying on Capitol Hill, talking also about cryptocurrency. But I just wanted to get your comment on the latest news that 47 states and U.S. territories are now joining with New York investigating Facebook, charging it with antitrust violations.

ROGER MCNAMEE: This is a really important initiative. If you had asked me two years ago whether I thought it was likely that we would see antitrust action against Google or Facebook, I would have said it was very, very unlikely. Essentially, the Republican Party has had as a core strategy to dismantle antitrust as one of the government’s functions as the arbiter of capitalism, and so we’ve reduced the opportunities for antitrust to something so small that effectively it appeared that internet platforms like Google and Facebook would be untouchable. In reality, they commit antitrust violations every single day.

And the good news is that state attorneys general are in a position to act on this because many states have privacy laws. Many of them have consumer protection laws that these companies have violated every single day. And we see 47 states and territories going after Facebook. We see 50 going after Google. This is incredibly welcome. It’s incredibly important. This is the very beginning of a process that is likely to take several years, but in my opinion, this is the most likely antitrust venue to have success in. And I think it is super important that it work, because these companies act as though they are not accountable to anybody, and in that context, they do great harm and escape any kind of punishment for it. And that just is wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, we want to find out exactly how you got Zucked—how you met Mark Zuckerberg and the evolution of that relationship along with the evolution of Facebook. We are talking to Roger McNamee. He’s the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He has had a 34-year career in Silicon Valley, was an early investor in Facebook. Stay with us.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/zucked-early-facebook-investor-roger-mcnamee-on-how-the-company-became-a-threat-to-democracy/

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met w/ djt, but neither talks about; FB steadily back away from commit to stop fake news, meddling, trump huge ad buy on biden BS

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https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook/

Mark Zuckerberg still thinks we're all "dumb fucks." 

This indisputable fact was once again ground into our skulls Thursday morning when the CEO of the toxic cesspool otherwise known as Facebook waxed semi-philosophic on free speech at Georgetown University. Amidst the tired and expected Reddit-logic-bro-like ramblings, one moment stood out for its sheer audacity: Zuckerberg's attempt to forcefully rewrite the history of his company's founding.

And he's clearly counting on us buying the lie.

Facebook, Zuckerberg insisted, was born out of the noblest of impulses to give "everyone a voice" in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yes, you read that correctly. 

Before we get into just how extremely bullshit we know this claim to be, it's worth reading it in its stupefying entirety.

When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.

Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, and I got to see my beliefs play out at smaller scale.

Got that? Zuckerberg is implying Facebook was a manifestation of his belief that giving people a voice would make the world a better place. Except we know that isn't true. 

Like, not even remotely.

Facebook's origin story is an incredibly well documented — if messy — one, and, unfortunately for the CEO, it paints him in a rather unflattering light. 

For those blissfully unaware, the development of TheFacebook followed on Zuckerberg's creation of a "Hot or Not" clone called Facemash, which scraped Harvard students' photos from an online directory and then asked students to rank the respective hotness of those pictured. 

Contemporaneous reporting by Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, laid it all out in clear detail. 

"The site was created entirely by Zuckerberg over the last week in October, after a friend gave him the idea," reads the 2003 article. "The website used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person."

Now, Zuckerberg has repeatedly insisted that Facemash was totally separate from Facebook. 

"The claim that Facemash was somehow connected to the development of Facebook... it isn't, it wasn't," he told Congress in 2018. 

If we are to believe that claim, which is itself dubious, then we are still left with scores of records showing that Zuckerberg made Facebook with dating services in mind.

"Like," Business Insider reports Zuckerberg as writing to his friend Adam D'Angelo just before the launch of TheFacebook.com, "I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating."

Of his notorious decision to delay working on a competitor's social network dubbed Harvard Connection so that he could get TheFacebook up in time?

"I'm going to fuck them," Business Insider reports him as telling a friend.  

Even Zuckerberg himself has, in the past, provided a sanitized retelling of his justification for launching Facebook that had nothing to do with the lofty claims he made today. 

"Ten years ago," CNBC reports him as telling Freakonomics Radio in 2018, "you know, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools."

Now, there is itself nothing wrong with launching a dating or social website. However, when that site morphs into the democracy-eating beast that is the present-day Facebook, understanding how and why that transition happened is of some pretty serious import.

SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg says the real threat is TikTok and China

Self mythologizing your company's origin story to make yourself into a T-shirt-sporting statesman, and assuming we're all dumb enough to lap up those lies reflects an ongoing desire on the part of Zuckerberg to bend reality to his will. 

For a man with such unparalleled power over both our elections and personal information, that should bother all of us. Unless, of course, us "fucks" are too dumb to notice.

TOPICS: FACEBOOK, MARK ZUCKERBERG, SOCIAL-MEDIA-COMPANIES, TECH

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/elizabeth-warren-calls-out-mark-zuckerberg-over-new-facebook-ad-policies-after-his-meeting-with-trump-the-public-deserves-to-know/

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