Facebook/Zuck

retro promoted to primary; fbk tag 10/18, also pioneersee FACEBOOK 2 For newer\capt 919<a href="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/">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/</a>==

big VR buy/play vs sony

[early call to congrat trmp by zuck?]Exactly what happened between Facebook and Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of virtual-reality company Oculus, which Facebook bought in 2014, has been the subject of speculation since Luckey left the company last year.In September 2016, just before the US presidential election, the Daily Beast revealed that Luckey had <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-near-billionaire-secretly-funding-trumps-meme-machine" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; transition: opacity 0.3s ease 0s;">donated $10,000 to Nimble America</a>, a pro-Donald Trump meme factory that often attacked Hillary Clinton. In a <a href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10209141115659366&id=1063830478" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; transition: opacity 0.3s ease 0s;">statement following the report</a>, Luckey said, “I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.” He added that he was a libertarian and supported that party’s candidate, Gary Johnson. Six months later, he left Facebook.Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and CEO, have maintained that Luckey’s political views were not the reason for his departure. A <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump-1541965245" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; transition: opacity 0.3s ease 0s;">report by the Wall Street Journal</a> (paywall) found that Luckey was, however, pressured to hide his support of Trump in the fall of 2016, and urged to publicly back Johnson instead. The Journal reviewed internal Facebook emails from the company’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, to a lawyer for Luckey that indicate Zuckerberg himself drafted Luckey’s apology statement.,...gateway drug soc network and loss of privacyhttps://medium.com/@d1gi/data-is-the-real-post-truth-so-heres-the-truth-about-post-election2016-propaganda<a href="https://boingboing.net/2016/11/26/trumps-presidential-hires-an.html">https://boingboing.net/2016/11/26/trumps-presidential-hires-an.html</a>Floyd Brown invented the Reagan-era Willie Horton lie, helped create the Citizens United group, and now owns Liftable Media, including sites like Conservative Tribune (50th most-trafficked site in the USA) and Western Journalism (81st), whence came fake news stories like the lie that Obama had altered the White House logo to include a white flag of surrender (the logo change came from GWB's White House); the lie that Muslims had been "ordered" to vote for Hillary; the lie that Obama had encouraged millennial non-citizen Latin@s to vote without fear of reprisals; the lie that Clinton had a Vegas "drug holiday" before the debate; the lie that Obama's birth certificate was not accepted by experts as genuine -- Brown's sites are all included in Facebook's verified news sources.Brown is a Trump advisor, also identified by Trump's spokesperson as "a close friend."Laura Ingraham is another Trump ally who's been tapped to be his presidential secretary: she owns the Ingraham Media Group, including sites like Lifezette, which produced the hoax video "Clinton Body Count," which accused the Clintons of conspiring to crash John F Kennedy, Jr's airplane and of complicity with many other deaths, a video that was shared 14,000,000 times after its successful viral debut on Facebook.Lifezette also produced a viral hoax video about George Soros buying a voting machine company whose products were widely used in counting US ballots (Soros didn't invest in the company, nor does that company supply US ballots). Other Lifezette hoaxes include a story asserting that a Wikileaks-published document linked Clinton to occult rituals.Most significant of all, though, is Trump's presidential chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart News is a font of hoaxes and slanders:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; border-left: 4px solid rgb(153, 153, 153); padding-left: 1em; margin: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked.</blockquote><a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies</a>[Lee Fang/The Intercept]THE EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump.By that reckoning, entrepreneurial Macedonian <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.xymy3QKRv#.dqyJ0KO57" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">teenagers</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">opportunists in Tbilisi</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-journalists-opportunity-comes-in-clicks-and-bucks/2016/11/20/d58d036c-adbf-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">California millennials</a> have exploited social media algorithms in order to make money — only incidentally leading to the viral proliferation of mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama hoaxes and conspiracy theories that thrilled many Trump supporters. The Washington Post published a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">shoddy report</a> on Thursday alleging that Russian state-sponsored <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_propaganda-8pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">propagandists</a> were seeking to promote Trump through fabricated stories for their own reasons, independent of the candidate himself.But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump’s political advisers and consultants.Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/14/media/laura-ingraham-press-secretary/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">under consideration</a> to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LifeZette/videos/356164274715005/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">video</a> produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/laura-ingraham-lifezette-hillary-clinton-bill-2016-10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">some role</a> in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.
imgAnother LifeZette <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LifeZette/videos/394720544192711/" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" color="color" rgb="rgb" text-decoration="text-decoration">video</a>, picking up false claims from other sites, claimed that voting machines “might be compromised” because a voting machine company called Smartmatic, allegedly providing voting machines “in sixteen states,” was purchased by the liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10/24/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-election-george-soross-voting-machines/" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" color="color" rgb="rgb" text-decoration="text-decoration">never purchased</a> the company, and Smartmatic did not provide voting machines used in the general election.The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.One LifeZette article <a href="http://www.snopes.com/un-backs-secret-obama-takeover-of-police/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">misleadingly</a> <a href="http://www.snopes.com/un-backs-secret-obama-takeover-of-police/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">claimed</a> that the United Nations backed a “secret” Obama administration takeover of local police departments. The article referenced Justice Department orders that a select few police departments address patterns of misconduct, a practice that, in reality, long predates the Obama presidency, is hardly secret, and had no relation to the United Nations.Another LifeZette article, which <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/drudge-hannity-and-ingraham-push-claim-that-john-podesta-practices-occult-magic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">went viral</a> in the week prior to the election, falsely claimed that Wikileaks had revealed that a senior Hillary Clinton campaign official had engaged in <a href="https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/wikileaks-podesta-practices-occult-magic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">occult rituals</a>. Ingraham’s site regularly receives links from the Drudge Report and other powerful drivers of Internet traffic.But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m3Ww0qdOrM" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">longtime friend</a>.”Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he owns called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with <a href="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/11/westernjournalism.png" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">13 million</a> monthly unique page views, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the <a href="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/11/conservativetribune.png" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">50th largest site</a> with over 19 million monthly unique visitors.
As the fact-checking website Snopes was quick to <a href="http://www.snopes.com/white-house-logo-change/" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" color="color" rgb="rgb" text-decoration="text-decoration">note</a>, it was no signal of surrender and the bleached white version of the White House logo, complete with a white flag, was not even an Obama creation. The white logo dates back to as early as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030919050031/http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/progress/progress_report_0903.pdf" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" color="color" rgb="rgb" text-decoration="text-decoration">2003</a>, under the Bush administration, which used it for official documents.Brown’s sites churn out bombastic headlines with little regard to the truth. One viral piece shared by Brown’s news outlets <a href="https://archive.fo/7RwN4" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">claimed</a> that President Obama had redesigned the White House logo to change the American flag to a white flag, “a common symbol for surrender, which has many people wondering if Obama was trying to secretly signal to America’s enemies that he was surrendering.” The Facebook post <a href="https://www.facebook.com/WesternJournalism/posts/10154472465718984" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">touted</a> the article with the line, “We all know Obama hates the United States, but what he just did to the White House logo is beyond the pale.”The Conservative Tribune and Western Journalism provide a steady stream of similarly deceptive, eye-catching headlines.“BREAKING: Muslims Ordered to Vote Hillary,” is the headline for one election <a href="http://conservativetribune.com/american-muslims-given-orders/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">post</a> that grossly mischaracterized a <a href="https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/162819-Pakistani-American-Muslims-make-final-push-for-Hillary" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">mundane</a> article about a Pakistani American activist going to door to door to help Clinton’s campaign. “Obama Urges Illegal Immigrants to Vote Without Fear of Getting Caught,” <a href="http://www.westernjournalism.com/obama-urges-illegal-immigrants-vote-without-fear-getting-caught/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">blared</a> Western Journalism, claiming that President Obama had suggested in an interview on issues facing Latino millennial voters that noncitizens could vote and “will never get caught if they do.” The article <a href="http://www.snopes.com/obama-encouraged-illegal-aliens-to-vote/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">left out</a> the part of the Obama interview in which he said noncitizens “can’t legally vote, but they’re counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.”The hits go on, with posts on a regular basis making claims ranging from the assertion that Clinton went on a “<a href="http://conservativetribune.com/debate-hillary-vanishes-expert/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">drug holiday</a>” before the Las Vegas presidential debate to <a href="http://www.westernjournalism.com/criminal-complaint-details-birth-certificate-forgery/?utm_source%3DFacebook%26utm_medium%3DPostTopSharingButtons%26utm_content%3D2016-08-16%26utm_campaign%3Dwebsitesharingbuttons" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">rumors</a> that Obama’s birth certificate is under serious scrutiny.Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown’s websites now outrank web traffic going to news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and NPR, according to data compiled by Alexa. Both Western Journalism and Conservative Tribune are certified by Facebook as bonafide news providers.Trump’s relationship with one particularly influential online news site with a history of fabricated stories couldn’t be much closer. Steve Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, took a leave of absence from the organization to become the chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign and has been tapped to serve as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Trump himself regularly promoted Breitbart stories, including a <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/226019096460918784" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">tweet</a> used to justify his campaign to prove Obama was not born in the U.S.Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing <a href="http://www.snopes.com/2015/06/14/breitbart-pear-flag/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">fake stories</a> sourced from <a href="http://www.snopes.com/2016/08/07/breitbart-duped-by-fake-news-again/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">online hoaxes</a>. The site once attempted to <a href="http://wonkette.com/605169/breitbart-and-stupidest-man-on-internet-cant-stop-posting-fake-ass-trump-rally-pictures" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">pass off</a> a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/12/02/trump-100-vindicated-cbs-reports-swarms-on-roofs-celebrating-911/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">defended</a> Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/dec/02/new-information-doesnt-fix-donald-trumps-911-claim/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">multiple</a> <a href="http://www.snopes.com/2015/11/22/donald-trump-cheering-911/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">fact-checking</a>organizations have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">thoroughly</a> debunked.Other conservative content farms, including WorldNetDaily, maintained ties to the Trump election effort. Campaign finance records show that Great America PAC, a Trump-backing Super PAC, <a href="http://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00608489/1098788/se" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">paid</a> WND, known as the largest purveyor of Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories, for “online voter contact.”The surge of fake news has been much commented on in the mainstream media — and its effect on Trump’s election victory has been widely debated — with little mention of the purveyors close to the Trump campaign.A <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Buzzfeed News article</a> that came out shortly before the election famously traced more than 100 pro-Trump websites to young entrepreneurs in a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, who discovered that the best way to generate clicks — at a fraction of a penny per click in ad revenue — is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook. After the election, New Yorker editor David Remnick <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">described</a> President Obama as “talking obsessively” about that article, and quoted him bemoaning its significance. “[T]he capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal, ” Obama said, “that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">interviewed Paul Horner</a>, the “impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire,” who sounded somewhat aghast when he said, “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.”Another <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-journalists-opportunity-comes-in-clicks-and-bucks/2016/11/20/d58d036c-adbf-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Washington Post story</a> described two Southern California slackers turning their website of made-up pro-Trump clickbait in a virtual goldmine. The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html?r=1" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">profiled</a> a fake news operation run by three brothers in Tbilisi, Georgia, who experimented with a variety of content, sometimes lifted from other sites, at other times made up from whole cloth, finding that pro-Trump material was the most popular, and therefore the most profitable.Finally, a Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">story</a> this week alleged a Russian government role in spreading fake news to help Trump. But its <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">sources were not remotely credible.</a> For instance, it cited a <a href="http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">list</a> that characterized as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” a number of well-established and well-respected websites including Truthdig, a site published by award-winning journalist and long-time Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, Naked Capitalism, and Truth Out.The growth of fake news isn’t confined to Trump or to conservative sites. A number of left-wing political sites have trafficked in demonstrably false stories, including deceptive pieces stoking fear about vaccines. Earlier this year, when critics called for Clinton to release the transcripts of her three paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, as well as to other interest groups, Daily News Bin, a new liberal website specializing in viral hits, <a href="http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/when-hillary-clinton-gave-a-speech-to-goldman-sachs-the-topic-was-female-entrepreneurship/23763/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">published</a> a piece titled, “Video surfaces of Hillary Clinton’s paid speech to Goldman Sachs, and it’s completely harmless.” The video embedded in the piece, however, was not one of Clinton’s paid speeches; it was a public event sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The article was shared over 120,000 times.“We live in a time when people don’t care about facts,” said Judy Muller, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.During the last three months of the campaign, Buzzfeed News found that the top 20 best-performing hoax stories related to the election <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.cdRmmroD7#.agdJJdz9O" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">had more Facebook engagement</a> than the 20 best-performing stories from major news outlets.Facebook has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/facebook-s-quest-to-stop-fake-news-risks-becoming-slippery-slope" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">responded</a> to the recent outcry over fake news websites with promises to crack down on obvious phony sites. Many critics are still worried that Facebook is not doing enough to counter outright lies promoted by the platform; meanwhile, others are concerned that such efforts risk suppressing critical information.Muller said that if Ingraham is nominated by Trump to be his spokesperson to the press, she will have to distance herself from her growing Facebook content empire.But the demand for fake news is unlikely to subside.A recent study by Stanford University researchers found that students have <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">difficulty</a> discerning between fake content, corporate sponsored advertorial content posing as journalism, and legitimate news.“People only care about opinions that support their own biases,” said Muller. “So they’re not reading other people’s facts, they’re not checking the facts, and they don’t want to know — and that’s the scariest development to me.”freeper facebook page: also duck d wanna be<a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news">http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.fyovdvW932#.hqPXYXMjLo" style="text-decoration: none;">Buzzfeed News</a> analysis found that the top 20 fake political news stories in circulation during the election got more clicks, views, shares and reactions on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories. The vast majority of those fake stories—all but three—were “overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton,” meaning they pinged around the conservative webosphere, where they were accepted without question by millions and then passed to the next gullible consumer.Paul Horner, among the most prolific and successful fake news writers, recently told the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/fake-news-writer-feels-guilty-helping-put-trump-white-house" style="text-decoration: none;">Washington Post</a> that Trump voters and other “right-wing Republicans” were almost single-handedly responsible for the $10,000 he pulls in every month, because they “post everything, believe anything,” and continue to share fake news even when they find out it isn't true. That might explain why so many fake news stories seem specially tailored for the conservative news reader.One of Horner’s most popular stories was a fabricated interview with a made-up person who said he’d been paid to protest Trump ahead of the election. During the campaign, multiple members of <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/fake-news-writer-feels-guilty-helping-put-trump-white-house" style="text-decoration: none;">Trump’s team</a> retweeted the story, even though many sources pointed out it wasn't true. The ludicrous idea that anti-Trump demonstrators are each paid thousands of dollars by billionaire George Soros—who plays a starring role in pretty much every right-wing conspiracy—has now become conservative gospel.Eric Tucker, a marketer in Austin, Texas, was probably very familiar with this rumor when he recently sent an erroneous tweet that launched a viral right-wing story.The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=NovHighMC&mcdt=2016-11&subid=NovHighMC&ad-keywords=AudDevGate&r=0" style="text-decoration: none;">New York Times</a> decided to examine how Tucker's tweet became a major topic of conservative discussion, following its online travels step by step. On the evening of November 9, just as protests against President-elect Trump were erupting all over the country, Tucker tweeted the photo and message below to his tiny group of 40followers. <div alt="" class="media-image" height="447" width="480" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[img]</div>According to the Times, Tucker heard about anti-Trump demonstrations in Austin hours after he saw the buses in the photo, and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (except that if you look for boogeymen everywhere you will find them), assumed a connection between the two. The Times confirmed that Tucker’s photo actually features buses booked for employees of Tableau Software, which was having a conference in the city. (Tucker told the Times he did a search for nearby conferences but didn’t find anything.) Roughly four hours after the original tweet went out, it ended up <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5c6ag1/breaking_they_found_the_buses_dozens_lined_up/" style="text-decoration: none;">on Reddit</a>. “BREAKING: They found the buses!” the header reads. “Dozens lined up just blocks away from the Austin protests.” The thread of comments that follow indicate subreddits full of Trump supporters who, riding high on an election victory, are ecstatic to have a new conspiracy they can hang on the left.“Alex Jones is based in Austin,” one commenter declares. “Let him know, and his crew can check it out.”That’s followed by a lot of wishing the worst on Soros, complaints about “cucks,” suggestions that James O’Keefe get involved, and a lot of assumptions rooted in racism and paranoia. “Busing in violent mobs? Please tell me how this isn't inciting treason,” one person demands. This inexplicably devolves into a conversation about Obamaphones.By the morning of November 10, the story appeared on right-wing message board Free Republic, where a user linked back to the original tweet. Here’s the point at which things quickly build momentum, picking up the pace across right-wing echo chambers. According to the Times, that same day, “Facebook pages like Robertson Family Values, which is named for but not affiliated with the stars of ‘Duck Dynasty,’ and Donald Trump Commander in Chief 2020, linked to the Free Republic discussion.” A Times screengrab of a Free Republican Facebook post repeating the Reddit message shows 307,616 shares. The paper also cites 5,000 shares of each of the aforementioned blog posts.By now, the story had trickled upward to local news outlets. When the Austin-based affiliate for Fox called Coach USA North America bus company to get more information, they were told by spokesperson Sean Hughes that the company wasn’t involved in any protests. Hughes even sent the station a <a href="http://www.fox5ny.com/news/216900687-story" style="text-decoration: none;">statement clarifying</a> that buses were in town "for a conference” and that “at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests." The television station’s website, now empty of most of the content that appeared there, still features photos of the buses taken by Tucker, with a caption that poses this leading question: “Were tens of thousands of protesters across the U.S. paid to walk the streets, hold signs, and chant anti-Trump sayings?”That evening, Gateway Pundit, a major conservative blog, posted a story with the headline, “Figures. Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed in to Austin #FakeProtests.” They used Tucker’s original pictures, and according to the Times, linked the nonexistent busloads of fake protesters to “Soros money.” Three hours later, President-elect Trump or someone on his team took to social media <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/796900183955095552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="text-decoration: none;">to tweet</a> about the fake story to his 16 million followers.“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” the message reads. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”As of this writing, the tweet has more than 71,000 retweets and 240,000 likes.<div class="in_content_ad_container ad_13" style="width: 300px; height: 250px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); float: left; margin: 0px 15px 15px 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="div-gpt-ad-1420251685282-1" data-google-query-id="CNm1-YvAxNACFUIGgQodYvQMMw" style="width: 300px; height: 250px;"><div id="google_ads_iframe/1010624/New_AlterNet_300x250_STORY_EMBED_2_0container" style="border: 0pt none; display: inline-block; width: 300px; height: 250px;"></div></div></div><div alt="" class="media-image" height="258" width="480" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="258" width="480" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/large/public/screen_shot_2016-11-23_at_4.22.48_pm.png" style="border: none;" /></div>On November 11, a spokesperson for Tableau, the tech company that rented the buses for its conference attendees, sent a statement to the Austin American-Statesman. The newspaper, in turn, published <a href="http://austin.blog.statesman.com/2016/11/11/anti-trump-protesters-in-austin-not-bused-in-contrary-to-twitter-verse/" style="text-decoration: none;">an article</a> debunking Tucker’s original tweet and all of the stories that followed. Included was an interview with Eric Tucker, who praised Alex Jones and stated, “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”Later in the day, according to the Times, Tucker sent a tweet that acknowledged the possibility his first suggestion may have been “flat wrong.” There was also a <a href="http://www.snopes.com/anti-trump-protesters-bused-into-austin/" style="text-decoration: none;">Snopes article</a> declaring the rumor false. Instead of stopping the fake news dead in its tracks, the case essentially turned into proof that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes. Also, the internet loves a lie that supports its political agenda. According to the Times, “Mr. Tucker’s initial tweet continued to generate thousands of shares on Facebook through Free Republic and pages like Right Wing News and Joe the Plumber.”On the night of November 11, Tucker put up the tweet below, which shows his original message updated to carry a bright red “FALSE” across it. The corrected tweet, as of this writing, has a paltry 60 retweets and 66 likes. He told the Times that moving forward, "I can assure you I’m going to try my best to be balanced with the facts and be very clear about what is opinion and what is not." He also said that knowing what he knows now, he “might have still tweeted it but very differently. I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement.”The same night, Tucker finally trashed the tweet that started it all. While that’s been scrubbed from social media, its impact isn’t going anywhere. Neither, coincidentally, is President-elect Donald Trump. =<table border="0" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_33927" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); width: 524px;"><tbody id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_33926" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; width: 524px;"><tr id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_33925" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><td id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_33924" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; border-spacing: 2px; line-height: 21px;"><h2 id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_35532" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0.83em 0px; padding: 0px;">Facebook's Fake News Crisis</h2>Thanks to Facebook, there is a plague of fake news sweeping America. Even President Obama <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2g5z401&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1118weeklya&n=9" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_35521" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">is talking about it</a>. We do not mean satire like The Onion or The Daily Show, but actual fake news that is just a total lie. Facebook has enabled dozens of fake news sites to rise and prosper, to the point where fake news <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2g0GuUa&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1118weeklya&n=10" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_35519" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">outperformed</a> real news on Facebook during the last three months of the election. This has long been at the margins on Facebook, but kicked into overdrive when Facebook fired the human editors of their trending topics section and replaced them with an algorithm. Why did Facebook do that? Mark Zuckerberg was <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2fSSLKi&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1118weeklya&n=11" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">reportedly afraid</a> of a conservative backlash. As a former Facebook employee told Chris Hayes, Zuckerberg's excuses <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2fVVkv7&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1118weeklya&n=12" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">do not add up</a>. If you want a perfect example of how bad things are, just look at <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2F2fUwFHv&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1118weeklya&n=13" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1479316553911_35518" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">this Denzel Washington meme</a> that trended. Enough is enough: it's time for Facebook to take this problem seriously.</td></tr></tbody></table><a href="https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/11/17/tech-companies-debate-how-to-handle-fake-news/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/11/17/tech-companies-debate-how-to-handle-fake-news/</a>accenture subcontractors, 1 post 10 secs---
<a href="http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained</a>Facebook's fake news problem, explainedUpdated by Timothy B. Leetim@vox.com  Nov 16, 2016, 9:10am EST
News stories are supposed to help ordinary voters understand the world around them. But in the 2016 election, news stories online too often had the opposite effect. Stories rocketed around the internet that were misleading, sloppily reported, or in some cases totally made up.
Over the course of 2016, Facebook users learned that the pope endorsed Donald Trump (he didn’t), that a Democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton (it never happened), that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old girl (a total fabrication), and many other totally bogus “news” stories. Stories like this thrive on Facebook because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes “engagement” — and a reliable way to get readers to engage is by making up outrageous nonsense about politicians they don’t like.
New Money logoA big problem here is that the internet has broken down the traditional distinction between professional news-gathering and amateur rumor-mongering. On the internet, the “Denver Guardian” — a fake news site designed to look like a real Colorado newspaper — can reach a wide audience as easily as real news organizations like the Denver Post, the New York Times, and Fox News.
Since last week’s election, there has been a fierce debate about whether the flood of fake news — much of it prejudicial to Hillary Clinton — could have swung the election to Donald Trump. Internet giants are coming under increasing pressure to do something about the problem.
On Monday, Google announced that it was going to cut fake news sites off from access to its vast advertising network, depriving them of a key revenue source. Facebook quickly followed suit with its own ad network.
At the same time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled reluctance to have Facebook become more active in weeding out fake news stories. He described it as “a pretty crazy idea” to think fake news on Facebook could have swayed the election. He says Facebook will look for new ways to stop the spread of fake news, but he also argues that “we must proceed very carefully” and that Facebook must be “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
The importance of this issue is only going to grow over time. More and more people are getting their news from the internet, putting more and more power in the hands of companies like Google, Twitter, and especially Facebook. The leaders of those companies are going to be under increasing pressure to use that power wisely.
The internet is growing up
In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to think of the internet as a decentralized, even anarchic, place where no one was really in charge. Online-only news organizations were still in their infancy, so that most people either got their news from traditional sources like newspapers or cable news shows, or else they went to the home pages of conventional news organizations like the New York Times, the Atlantic, or Fox News.
The rise of social media sites has changed things in two major ways.
First, social media has drastically lowered barriers to entry in the news business. It has always been easy for anyone to publish a website, of course. But as news consumption is increasingly driven by social media sharing, it’s becoming easier than ever for no-name sites to reach a big audience.
At the same time, a handful of big tech companies — Twitter, Google, and especially Facebook — have gained a huge and growing influence over what news people see. 44 percent of US adults tell pollsters they got news from Facebook in 2016. That’s vastly larger than other news-focused social media sites like Twitter (9 percent) and Reddit (2 percent). And while many people get their news from television programs or newspapers, those media are divided among many competing news organizations. This means that Facebook has a larger influence over ordinary Americans’ media diets than almost any other news organization.
Normally we think that organizations with a lot of power have an obligation to use that power responsibly. But the leaders of the largest technology companies have resisted thinking of themselves in those terms. They like to think of their sites as neutral platforms that help users share information with each other — without the company making value judgments of its own.
But this isn’t how power works. When an authority figure turns a blind eye to a problem that’s happening under his watch, the problem doesn’t go away. It festers, often becoming an even bigger problem over time.
Fake news is a problem, but we don’t know how big it isThe problem of fake news is so new that we don’t have definitive data on how big of a problem it is. But there are some reasons to think it could be very significant...Publicly, Facebook’s CEO has downplayed the site’s role in distributing fake news online. But privately, there’s a raging debate inside Facebook about how it could do more.<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/renegade-facebook-employees-form-task-force-to-battle-fake-n?utm_term=.deYmWoarM4#.ytGb5RBm36" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">BuzzFeed reports</a> that some Facebook employees are frustrated by Zuckerberg’s blasé response to concerns about fake news on the social media platform.“What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that,” one anonymous engineer wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “He knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”One reason Facebook’s management has been so cautious on this issue is that it’s still smarting from the controversy earlier this year over Facebook’s trending news feature. Until this summer, Facebook employed a team of professional journalists to curate the trending news box that appeared in the right-hand rail next to the Facebook newsfeed.Then in May, one of Facebook’s trending news editors <a href="http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">told Gizmodo</a> that the team was routinely suppressing trending stories that slanted in a conservative direction. That caused a massive backlash, including <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/10/11650784/facebook-trending-topics-news-us-senate-commerce-committee" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">questions from Republicans in Congress</a> about Facebook’s editorial policies. This led to Facebook <a href="http://qz.com/768122/facebook-fires-human-editors-moves-to-algorithm-for-trending-topics/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">terminating the entire trending news team</a>. Today, Facebook uses software to choose which headlines appear in this box.
THUNEBut with the human editors gone, Facebook had a new problem: It <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebooks-trending-fail-news-section-reportedly-highlights-fake-news-on-megyn-kelly/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">started to see fake stories</a> showing up in the trending box. Facebook’s trending news algorithm simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to distinguish an accurate news story from an inaccurate one.The current debate over fake news on Facebook can be seen as a much broader version of the same controversy. Nobody is going to defend fake news per se. But once you start injecting human editorial judgment into content decisions, questions of bias are inevitably going to come up.This is a particularly tricky issue because it’s not easy to draw a line between articles that are totally fake and articles that are just highly misleading or based on shoddy reporting.For example, after <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.rsBwZrpk9#.rozdJxN78" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">BuzzFeed reported</a> that 43 percent of articles from a hyperpartisan site called Right Wing News were either “mostly false” or a “mix of true and false,” the site’s editor insisted that many of the articles classified as false were <a href="http://rightwingnews.com/publicity/responding-buzzfeeds-hit-piece-right-wing-news/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">actually accurate</a>. <a href="http://www.chicksontheright.com/only-5-7-of-the-clinton-foundations-budget-went-to-charitable-grants-in-2014/?utm_source=RWN&utm_medium=RWN&utm_campaign=RWN" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">One story claimed</a> that the Clinton Foundation devoted only 10 percent of its revenue to charity, a figure it got from a Federalist article that <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/27/in-2013-the-clinton-foundation-only-spent-10-percent-of-its-budget-on-charitable-grants/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">only counted grants</a> to third-party organizations, not charitable activities carried out by the Clinton Foundation itself, in calculating total charitable spending.It seems pretty clear that the Federalist and Right Wing News are in the wrong here. It’s not reasonable to count a foundation’s own charitable programs as overhead. But if Facebook were to classify this story as fake news and ban it from the site, some conservatives are going to see that as evidence of left-wing bias.Also, any effort to weed out fake news at Facebook’s scale is going to lead to some straight-up mistakes. If these mistakes disproportionately target conservative viewpoints, that’s going to create a backlash that will hurt Facebook’s brand with tens of millions of conservative Facebook users.“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully,” Zuckerberg wrote in a <a href="http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/13/13613826/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fake-news" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">Sunday Facebook post</a>. He argued that many stories “express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”<h3 id="9PVtUG" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 0.6rem; padding: 0px;">Banning fake news might be the wrong approach</h3>Most of the discussion about how Facebook could address fake news has assumed that the goal is to banish fake news from the platforms. But there are a couple of other approaches that might ultimately work better....<div class="yiv9019667333item-hed" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478279287562_3223" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-family: " helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://go.propublica.org/e/125411/l-utm-campaign-dailynewsletter/38xv6h/71031358" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478279287562_3222" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: none;">Lawmakers to Facebook: Don’t Let Advertisers Exclude by Race</a></div><div class="yiv9019667333byline" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478279287562_3116" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; line-height: 1.1;">by Eric Umansky</div><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="yiv9019667333item-tools" width="349" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" segoe="Segoe" ui="UI" arial="Arial" lucida="Lucida" grande="Grande" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><tbody style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; width: 349px;" /></table>Four members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg telling him that the company should stop allowing advertisers to exclude people by race. =<a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/low-income-families-evicted-silicon-valley-apartments-so-building-can-rebrand-facebook">http://www.alternet.org/economy/low-income-families-evicted-silicon-valley-apartments-so-building-can-rebrand-facebook</a>confrim?=<h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 12.5px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">… Who needs villains?</h2>In the meantime, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/06/01/sheryl-sandberg-peter-thiel-will-remain-on-facebooks-board/#4820bfd63fb5" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">Facebook certainly isn’t doing itself any favors</a>. At the Recode conference earlier this month in California, company COO Sheryl Sandberg strongly endorsed Thiel’s right to “think differently than other people” in a June 1 article appearing in Forbes. That phrase certainly gains a new resonance after the June 9 SPLC report.In the same Forbes interview, Sandberg extolled Thiel’s different thinking as a desirable character trait:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 12.5px 25px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; border-left: 5px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); line-height: 28.5px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“… We have very independent board members with very independent thoughts that they share publicly.”“Those strong people make really good board members because they have strong views, and they’re not afraid to think differently than other people, which has served Facebook well …”</blockquote>Sandberg also referred to another controversy this spring, in which Facebook took fire from conservatives for supposedly shutting conservative-friendly news out of its Trending Topics links. The dustup ended with a meeting between the two sides.The result, Forbes suggests, is that Facebook will be more likely to promote conservative ideas in the future:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 12.5px 25px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; border-left: 5px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“We want the continuing dialogue on what we think makes the platform work for them,” she added, noting that the political figures at the meeting were highly interested in discussing how to best promote their ideas on the platform. “People believe Silicon Valley has a liberal bias, so we understood the concern.”http://www.triplepundit.com/2016/06/wake-gawker-case-peter-thiel-drags-facebook-white-nationalist-territory/</blockquote>nj school fail but<span style="font-family: " exchange="Exchange" ssm="SSm" r="r" exchangeweb-roman="ExchangeWeb-Roman" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">So now, instead of massive top-down attempts to cram innovation into the public school system, some tech-minded parents and entrepreneurs are building their own alternatives. Home schooling has become a trend in the tech community; it’s “off the charts” at Google, Khan says. When it came time to educate his own children, Elon Musk hired a local teacher and built a 20-person school without grades or age-based cohorts. Zuckerberg and the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz participated in a $100 million funding round for AltSchool, a software-driven private school franchise founded by a Google alum. Facebook has partnered with a network of charter schools to build pedagogical software, one of a wave of new California schools using technology to make classroom education more flexible and individualized. “The Bay Area is <span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: " exchange="Exchange" ssm="SSm" i="i" exchangeweb-italic="ExchangeWeb-Italic" r="r" exchangeweb-roman="ExchangeWeb-Roman" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">the<span style="font-family: " exchange="Exchange" ssm="SSm" r="r" exchangeweb-roman="ExchangeWeb-Roman" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> destination for educators who want to see early signs of what these new school models could look like,” says Brian Greenberg, CEO of the Silicon Schools Fund, a nonprofit that has backed the Lab School and other new schools.requirement for real name creates privacy vulnerability, cf Anon=<a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/ted-cruz-campaign-hires-dirty.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/ted-cruz-campaign-hires-dirty.html</a>
Cruz used dirty data-miners that harvested info on millions of Facebook usersCambridge Analytica is an obscure data-mining company funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer (Cruz's main financial backer). Cambridge Analytica created "psychographic profiles" of millions of Facebook users by scraping their personal data without their knowledge or permission.
The Cruz campaign has paid Cambridge Analytica $750,000 so far, while Mercer-funded super-PACs have given Cambridge a further $2.5M over the past two years.
Cambridge Analytica refused to answer any questions from the press about its research methodologies, and hung up on a Guardian reporter when he phoned for a comment. According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Cambridge paid Mechanical Turk pieceworkers turn over data from their Facebook accounts, including data on their friends, aiming to collect the personal information of every American user of the service. Facebook also declined to comment on the story.
The academic used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights.
This was achieved by recruiting MTurk users by paying them about one dollar to take a personality questionnaire that gave access to their Facebook profiles. This raised the alarm among some participants, who flagged Kogan for violating MTurk’s terms of service. “They want you to log into Facebook and then download a bunch of your information,” complained one user at the time.
Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends=hired to trash googlehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/scocca/2011/05/12/burson_marsteller_has_another_image_problem.htmlBURSON-MARSTELLER HAS ANOTHER IMAGE PROBLEMSlateSCOCCAA BLOG ABOUT POLITICS, SPORTS, MEDIA, STUFFMAY 12 2011 4:32 PMBurson-Marsteller Has Another Image Problem
By Tom Scocca
Oh, look: the globe-bestriding publicity firm Burson-Marsteller has yet another project for yet another client. The Daily Beast reported : Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post. The stories of Google's privacy invasion, the Daily Beast wrote, were being pushed on behalf of Facebook. Maybe that led to yesterday's scary-sounding—but confusing—
Gawker postabout a "creepy" and "pretty evil" effort by Google to compete with Facebook by "quietly mining your Gmail contacts database." (Gawker cited a Business Insider storyabout Google's quest for a "social graph" of its own.)Quietly! The Google Social Circle does sound pretty invasive, at first. But unlike the dread Google Buzz—or Facebook's entire turn-a-private-network-into-an-opt-out-data-mine business plan—it doesn't really seem to know anything about you unless you've created a Google Profile and agreed to let Google examine your various social accounts. (And why would you do that? Have you learned nothing from the Facebook experience? Unclick every checkboxin sight.)
The Daily Beast:Burson, in its pitch to journalists, claimed Social Circle was "designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC." Also from Burson: "The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission." Yes, the American people must be made aware of Google's alleged intrusions into their personal lives because Facebook wants to keep the lucrative privacy-violation market to itself.Is that the story that Mark Zuckerberg was paying Burson-Marsteller to promote? Because that's the story Facebook has ended up buying: the story that Facebook is the sort of deceitful scumbag hypocrite company that would hire Burson for its dirty work.What's the advantage to hiring Burson anymore? The CEO, Mark Penn, is "best known as the chief strategist in Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign," the Daily Beast wrote. Here's a little refresher on how that went, asreported by Time magazine:As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" In the end, though, it wasn't Penn's incompetence that got him demoted by the campaign—it was his toxic and unethicalentanglement with Burson clients, including "drug companies, a tuna industry group, a tobacco firm and the controversial military contractor Blackwater USA," and finally the government of Colombia, which had hired Burson to push a free-trade deal that Hillary Clinton opposed.So Facebook was willing to hire a company whose CEO is identified with hilariously bungling tactical failure. And it was willing to join a list of clients and causes that has included, through the decades, Blackwater, the Union Carbide mass methyl isocyanate-gas* poisoning in Bhopal, the murderous Argentine junta, and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Those last two, a Burson spokesperson has pointed out, predate Mark Penn's time (as does Bhopal), so it is inaccurate and unfair to—Oh, wait: Foxconn, the Chinese tech supply company where theworkers were killing themselveslast year. Another Burson client.How will Facebook scrub the stink off itself now? How will Burson-Marsteller, for that matter, get people to stop thinking of poison, corruption, failure, and death when its name comes up? If only there were some sort of company out there that knew how to fix a damaged reputation.[* Correction: This sentence originally misidentified the toxic gas involved as chlorine.] Tom Scocca is the managing editor of Deadspin and the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.

=6/15<a href="http://www.alternet.org/labor/facebook-only-hired-7-black-people-latest-diversity-count">http://www.alternet.org/labor/facebook-only-hired-7-black-people-latest-diversity-count</a>

<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/23/1331951/-BREAKING-Facebook-to-leave-ALEC">http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/23/1331951/-BREAKING-Facebook-to-leave-ALEC</a>

On the heels of Microsoft, and then Google, leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Facebook-to-cut-ties-with-conservative-policy-5776055.php" target="_blank" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: rgb(124, 71, 12); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">a Facebook spokesperson now says that they will leave</a> the corporatist front group in 2015, as well:

<blockquote style="margin: 1.2em 0px; padding: 20px; line-height: 18.2px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(226, 226, 225); border-top: 1px solid rgb(226, 226, 225); color: rgb(36, 36, 36); font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: rgb(246, 243, 236);">Google’s departure, “really puts Facebook and Yahoo in an uncomfortable position,” said Jay Riestenberg, a research analyst with Common Cause who follows ALEC.

Facebook may be next out the ALEC door, a company spokesperson told The Chronicle on Tuesday.

“We re-evaluate our memberships on an annual basis and are in that process now,” a company representative wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper. “While we have tried to work within ALEC to bring that organization closer to our view on some key issues, it seems unlikely that we will make sufficient progress so we are not likely to renew our membership in 2015.”

</blockquote>

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human experiment emotions?

<a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebooks-manipulative-experiment/">http://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebooks-manipulative-experiment/</a>

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/309616_Facebook_Policy_Didnt_Mention_

==

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Kings-Journey-Network-ebook/dp/B007MAXH38">http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Kings-Journey-Network-ebook/dp/B007MAXH38</a>

The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of th… (Kindle Edition) by Katherine Losse

<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/27/7-juiciest-bits-from-boy-kings-new-facebook-book-by-employee-no-51.html">http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/27/7-juiciest-bits-from-boy-kings-new-facebook-book-by-employee-no-51.html</a>  eh

FBboykings

7/20/2014

http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Kings-Journey-Network-ebook/dp/B007MAXH38

The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of th… (Kindle Edition) by Katherine Losse

engl major, at one pt deputized to do zuck post; fav bks= I don't read" p6

pzwd see all acc'ts

Zuckerberg’s Vision

Mark Zuckerberg had a grand and also vague vision for Facebook. “I just want to create information flow,” he would say. The idea was too general to disagree with, and “we knew that we weren’t supposed to disagree.”  He would end meetings by saying either “domination” or “revolution.”

too busy coding to get liberal arts concepts like inequality: p 24 More Zuckerberg Immaturity

Zuckerberg, Losse says, wrote on his business card, “I’m CEO, bitch.” When a female employee reported that a male co-worker in the lunch line said, “I want to put my teeth in your ass,” Zuckerberg responded in a meeting, “What does that even mean?” vs losse recognizes clasic neo-colonial: few smart white guys and everyone else 26  later coders and "support" incl ppl with social skills, advocates for users 75 exclusion sparked revolt [no actual HR div for a long time, Mad Men" p 121 "technical purge of women

p 26 supposed to be bold rule breakers, but always seen as threat to be co-opted.

Newsfeed automated blurts, showed  how ideology and socail cluelessness wins 43 automated gossip where the act of updating is news? a lulz generator, vs philos args 44 ruined my life 91

pretend you're playing even when working, life as 9video?) game p 54

goal to find (info about) ppl 89

act w/o ppl/eye cntact

Judgebook ranks woamen on looks [like origin?]; in gen'l FB "info" means how pretty/popular are you 128

when add FB, autmatically invited all (in email?)

if no post, no exist 204

fb boys never share actualy feeling b/c = "vulns"; trolling native mode of IN; tried to monertize love? not implemented 207 'credits"

===

<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks-history-of-tracking-you">http://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks-history-of-tracking-you</a>

For years people have noticed a funny thing about Facebook's ubiquitous Like button. It has been sending data to Facebook tracking the sites you visit. Each time details of the tracking were revealed, Facebook promised that it wasn't using the data for any commercial purposes.

<p style=" font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1.4; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">No longer. Last week, Facebook announced it will start using its Like button and similar tools to <a href="http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-web-browsing-history-ad-targeting/293656/" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">track people across the Internet</a> for advertising purposes.

Here is the long history of the revelations and Facebook's denials:

<h2 class="styled-subhead" style="font-weight: bold; margin: 25px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg introduces the "transformative" Like button…...</h2>

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ceo GS Blankfein best paid bank ceo pulls a Buffet; new study on inequality says 300:1; zuckerberg alone skews the data, tho dabbles in charity?

sjmn

Some of the nation's wealthiest individuals increased their donations to charities last year, led by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's gift of nearly $1 billion in company stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, ranked first among the nation's biggest donors in 2013, according to a report Monday by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which tracks charitable giving trends.

Five other tech industry figures, including Google's Sergey Brin and Oracle's Larry Ellison, made the Chronicle's list of the 50 biggest individual donors to charity last year. All told, the 50 donors gave $7.7 billion, or 4 percent more than in 2012.

After subtracting bequests from individuals who died, the Chronicle counted $6.2 billion in giving by living donors -- more than twice the amount given by living donors in 2012. Those donations are considered a better indication of current trends in charitable giving, since bequests after death are often planned years in advance.

A resurgent stock market and broader recovery helped fuel that increase, according to Chronicle editor Stacy Palmer. And while the nation's biggest donors have traditionally made their money in finance or real estate, Palmer said it's significant that six of the top 50 came from the tech world.

"I expect we'll see more of that in coming years," she said, adding that Zuckerberg is setting an example by giving while still young.

Zuckerberg and his wife, both 29, led the way in 2013 by transferring 18 million shares of Facebook stock, worth about $990 million, to a charitable fund administered by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The Mountain View-based foundation, which operates similar funds for a number of wealthy individuals, typically allocates the money according to the donor's instructions or helps find recipients working on issues that are important to the donor.

It was the second such gift from Zuckerberg and Chan. They also transferred 18 million Facebook shares to the foundation in 2012. At the time, that first gift was valued at $500 million, but its value has almost doubled as Facebook's share price has soared over the last year.

Foundation officials, citing donor privacy, have declined to say exactly how the money will be used, although Zuckerberg and Chan have said they want to focus on education and health. In a recent donation, the foundation channeled $5 million from the couple to the Ravenswood Family Health Center, which serves low-income families in East Palo Alto and neighboring cities.

==

<a href="http://valleywag.gawker.com/facebook-just-bought-itself-a-police-officer-1537136075">http://valleywag.gawker.com/facebook-just-bought-itself-a-police-officer-1537136075</a>

facebook hires cop

===

<div class="byline rights" style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">CounterPunch</a> [1] / By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/darwin-bond-graham" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Darwin Bond-Graham</a> [2] (see also on uber car privatization/externalities)</div>

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Facebook's Future Plans for Data Collection Beyond All Imagination</h1>

</div>

<div class="story-date" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">December 4, 2013  |  </div>

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”

—Max Weber, 1905

</blockquote>

On November 12 Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”

“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded.

According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this information about users for targeting advertisements based on their perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are correlated with income levels.

They’ll have many more tools within the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data analytics revolutions has barely begun, and these firms are just beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and manipulating human behavior.

There are few, if any, government regulations restricting their imaginations at this point. Indeed, the U.S. President himself is a true believer in Big Data; the brain of Obama’s election team was a now famous “cave” filled with young Ivy League men (and a few women) sucking up electioneering information and crunching demographic and consumer data to target individual voters with appeals timed to maximize the probability of a vote for the new Big Blue, not IBM, but the Democratic Party’s candidate of “Hope” and “Change.” The halls of power are enraptured by the potential of rational-instrumental methods paired with unprecedented access to data that describes the social lives of hundreds of millions.

Facebook’s intellectual property portfolio reads like cliff notes summarizing the aspirations of all corporations in capitalist modernity; to optimize efficiency in order to maximize profits and reduce or externalize risk. Unlike most other corporations, and unlike previous phases in the development of rational bureaucracies, Facebook and its tech peers have accumulated never before seen quantities of information about individuals and groups. Recent breakthroughs in networked computing make analysis of these gigantic data sets fast and cheap. Facebook’s patent holdings are just a taste of what’s arriving here and now.

The way you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys. Facebook has even patented methods of individual identification with obviously cybernetic overtones, where the machine becomes an appendage of the person. U.S. Patents 8,306,256, 8,472,662, and 8,503,718, all filed within the last year, allow Facebook’s web robots to identify a user based on the unique pixelation and other characteristics of their smartphone’s camera. Identification of the subject is the first step toward building a useful data set to file among the billion or so other user logs. Then comes analysis, then prediction, then efforts to influence a parting of money.

Many Facebook patents pertain to advertising techniques that are designed and targeted, and continuously redesigned with ever-finer calibrations by robot programs, to be absorbed by the gazes of individuals as they scroll and swipe across their Facebook feeds, or on third party web sites.

Speaking of feeds, U.S. Patent 8,352,859, Facebook’s system for “Dynamically providing a feed of stories about a user of a social networking system” is used by the company to organize the constantly updated posts and activities inputted by a user’s “friends.” Of course embedded in this system are means of inserting advertisements. According to Facebook’s programmers, a user’s feeds are frequently injected with “a depiction of a product, a depiction of a logo, a display of a trademark, an inducement to buy a product, an inducement to buy a service, an inducement to invest, an offer for sale, a product description, trade promotion, a survey, a political message, an opinion, a public service announcement, news, a religious message, educational information, a coupon, entertainment, a file of data, an article, a book, a picture, travel information, and the like.” That’s a long list for sure, but what gets injected is more often than not whatever will boost revenues for Facebook.

The advantage here, according to Facebook, is that “rather than having to initiate calls or emails to learn news of another user, a user of a social networking website may passively receive alerts to new postings by other users.” The web robot knows best. Sit back and relax and let sociality wash over you, passively. This is merely one of Facebook’s many “systems for tailoring connections between various users” so that these connections ripple with ads uncannily resonant with desires and needs revealed in the quietly observed flow of e-mails, texts, images, and clicks captured forever in dark inaccessible servers of Facebook, Google and the like. These communications services are free in order to control the freedom of data that might otherwise crash about randomly, generating few opportunities for sales.

Where this fails Facebook ratchets up the probability of influencing the user to behave as a predictable consumer. “Targeted advertisements often fail to earn a user’s trust in the advertised product,” explain Facebook’s programmers in U.S. Patent 8,527,344, filed in September of this year. “For example, the user may be skeptical of the claims made by the advertisement. Thus, targeted advertisements may not be very effective in selling an advertised product.” Facebook’s computer programmers who now profess mastery over sociological forces add that even celebrity endorsements are viewed with skepticism by the savvy citizen of the modulated Internet. They’re probably right.

Facebook’s solution is to mobilize its users as trusted advertisers in their own right. “Unlike advertisements, most users seek and read content generated by their friends within the social networking system; thus,” concludes Facebook’s mathematicians of human inducement, “advertisements generated by a friend of the user are more likely to catch the attention of the user, increasing the effectiveness of the advertisement.” That Facebook’s current So-And-So-likes-BrandX ads are often so clumsy and ineffective does not negate the qualitative shift in this model of advertising and the possibilities of un-freedom it evokes.

Forget iPhones and applications, the tech industry’s core consumer product is now advertising. Their essential practice is mass surveillance conducted in real time through continuous and multiple sensors that pass, for most people, entirely unnoticed. The autonomy and unpredictability of the individual —in Facebook’s language the individual is the “user”— is their fundamental business problem. Reducing autonomy via surveillance and predictive algorithms that can placate existing desires, and even stimulate and mold new desires is the tech industry’s reason for being. Selling their capacious surveillance and consumer stimulus capabilities to the highest bidder is the ultimate end.

Sounds too dystopian? Perhaps, and this is by no means the world we live in, not yet. It is, however, a tendency rooted in the tech economy. The advent of mobile, hand-held, wirelessly networked computers, called “smartphones,” is still so new that the technology, and its services feel like a parallel universe, a new layer of existence added upon our existing social relationships, business activities, and political affiliations. In many ways it feels liberating and often playful. Our devices can map geographic routes, identify places and things, provide information about almost anything in real time, respond to our voices, and replace our wallets. Who hasn’t consulted “Dr. Google” to answer a pressing question? Everyone and everything is seemingly within reach and there is a kind of freedom to this utility.

Most of Facebook’s “users” have only been registered on the web site since 2010, and so the quintessential social network feels new and fun, and although perhaps fraught with some privacy concerns, it does not altogether fell like a threat to the autonomy of the individual. To say it is, is a cliche sci-fi nightmare narrative of tech-bureaucracy, and we all tell one another that the reality is more complex.

Privacy continues, however, too be too narrowly conceptualized as a liberal right against incursions of government, and while the tech companies have certainly been involved in a good deal of old-fashioned mass surveillance for the sake of our federal Big Brother, there’s another means of dissolving privacy that is more fundamental to the goals of the tech companies and more threatening to social creativity and political freedom.

Georgetown University law professor Julie Cohen notes that pervasive surveillance is inimical to the spaces of privacy that are required for liberal democracy, but she adds importantly, that the surveillance and advertising strategies of the tech industry goes further.

“A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures, which dampen and modulate behavioral variability, cannot hope to maintain a vibrant tradition of cultural and technical innovation,” writes Cohen in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article.

“Modulation” is Cohen’s term for the tech industry’s practice of using algorithms and other logical machine operations to mine an individual’s data so as to continuously personalize information streams. Facebook’s patents are largely techniques of modulation, as are Google’s and the rest of the industry leaders. Facebook conducts meticulous surveillance on users, collects their data, tracks their movements on the web, and feeds the individual specific content that is determined to best resonate with their desires, behaviors, and predicted future movements. The point is to perfect the form and function of the rational-instrumental bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber: to constantly ratchet up efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. If they succeed in their own terms, the tech companies stand to create a feedback loop made perfectly to fit each an every one of us, an increasingly closed systems of personal development in which the great algorithms in the cloud endlessly tailor the psychological and social inputs of humans who lose the gift of randomness and irrationality.

“It is modulation, not privacy, that poses the greater threat to innovative practice,” explains Cohen. “Regimes of pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation seek to mold individual preferences and behavior in ways that reduce the serendipity and the freedom to tinker on which innovation thrives.” Cohen has pointed out the obvious irony here, not that it’s easy to miss; the tech industry is uncritically labeled America’s hothouse of innovation, but it may in fact be killing innovation by disenchanting the world and locking inspiration in an cage.

If there were limits to the reach of the tech industry’s surveillance and stimuli strategies it would indeed be less worrisome. Only parts of our lives would be subject to this modulation, and it could therefore benefit us. But the industry aspires to totalitarian visions in which universal data sets are constantly mobilized to transform an individual’s interface with society, family, the economy, and other institutions. The tech industry’s luminaries are clear in their desire to observe and log everything, and use every “data point” to establish optimum efficiency in life as the pursuit of consumer happiness. Consumer happiness is, in turn, a step toward the rational pursuit of maximum corporate profit. We are told that the “Internet of things” is arriving, that soon every object will have embedded within it a computer that is networked to the sublime cloud, and that the physical environment will be made “smart” through the same strategy of modulation so that we might be made free not just in cyberspace, but also in the meatspace.

Whereas the Internet of the late 1990s matured as an archipelago of innumerable disjointed and disconnected web sites and databases, today’s Internet is gripped by a handful of giant companies that observe much of the traffic and communications, and which deliver much of the information from an Android phone or laptop computer, to distant servers, and back. The future Internet being built by the tech giants —putting aside the Internet of things for the moment— is already well into its beta testing phase. It’s a seamlessly integrated quilt of web sites and apps that all absorb “user” data, everything from clicks and keywords to biometric voice identification and geolocation.

United States Patent 8,572,174, another of Facebook’s recent inventions, allows the company to personalize a web page outside of Facebook’s own system with content from Facebook’s databases. Facebook is selling what the company calls its “rich set of social information” to third party web sites in order to “provide personalized content for their users based on social information about those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the social networking system.” Facebook’s users generated this rich social information, worth many billions of dollars as recent quarterly earnings of the company attest.

In this way the entire Internet becomes Facebook. The totalitarian ambition here is obvious, and it can be read in the securities filings, patent applications, and other non-sanitized business documents crafted by the tech industry for the financial analysts who supply the capital for further so-called innovation. Everywhere you go on the web, with your phone or tablet, you’re a “user,” and your social network data will be mined every second by every application, site, and service to “enhance your experience,” as Facebook and others say. The tech industry’s leaders aim to expand this into the physical world, creating modulated advertising and environmental experiences as cameras and sensors track our movements.

Facebook and the rest of the tech industry fear autonomy and unpredictability. The ultimate expression of these irrational variables that cannot be mined with algorithmic methods is absence from the networks of surveillance in which data is collected.

One of Facebook’s preventative measures is United States Patent 8,560,962, “promoting participation of low-activity users in social networking system.” This novel invention devised by programmers in Facebook’s Palo Alto and San Francisco offices involves a “process of inducing interactions,” that are meant to maximize the amount of “user-generated content” on Facebook by getting lapsed users to return, and stimulating all users to produce more and more data. User generated content is, after all, worth billions. Think twice before you hit “like” next time, or tap that conspicuously placed “share” button; a machine likely put that content and interaction before your eyes after a logical operation determined it to have the highest probability of tempting you to add to the data stream, thereby increasing corporate revenues.

Facebook’s patents on techniques of modulating “user” behavior are few compared to the real giants of the tech industry’s surveillance and influence agenda. Amazon, Microsoft, and of course Google hold some of the most fundamental patents using personal data to attempt to shape an individual’s behavior into predictable consumptive patterns. Smaller specialized firms like Choicestream and Gist Communications have filed dozens more applications for modulation techniques. The rate of this so-called innovation is rapidly telescoping.

Perhaps we do know who will live in the iron cage. It might very well be a cage made of our own user generated content, paradoxically ushering in a new era of possibilities in shopping convenience and the delivery of satisfactory experiences even while it eradicates many degrees of chance, and pain, and struggle (the motive forces of human progress) in a robot-powered quest to have us construct identities and relationships that yield to prediction and computer-generated suggestion. Defense of individual privacy and autonomy today is rightly motivated by the reach of an Orwellian security state (the NSA, FBI, CIA). This surveillance changes our behavior by chilling us, by telling us we are always being watched by authority. Authority thereby represses in us whatever might happen to be defined as “crime,” or any anti-social behavior at the moment. But what about the surveillance that does not seek to repress us, the watching computer eyes and ears that instead hope to stimulate a particular set of monetized behaviors in us with the intimate knowledge gained from our every online utterance, even our facial expressions and finger movements?

Darwin Bond-Graham, a contributing editor to CounterPunch, is a sociologist and author who lives and works in Oakland, CA. His essay on economic inequality in the “new” California economy appears in the<a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">July issue of CounterPunch magazine</a> [3]. He is a contributor to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a> [4]

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<div class="tags" style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">See more stories tagged with:

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/facebook-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">facebook</a> [5]</div>

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<div class="print-source_url" style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Source URL: <a href="http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior</a></div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Links:</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[1] http://www.counterpunch.org/</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/darwin-bond-graham</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[3] http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[4] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/facebook-0</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</div>

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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior">http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior</a>

==

<div class="byline story" style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">The Guardian</a> [1] / By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-pilkington" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Ed Pilkington</a> [2]</div>

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title" style=" text-align: left;">Facebook and Microsoft Help Fund Right-Wing Lobby Effort, Report Finds</h1>

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<div class="story-date" style=" font-weight: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">November 14, 2013  |  </div>

Some of America’s largest technology and telecoms companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T, are backing a network of self-styled “free-market thinktanks” promoting a radical rightwing agenda in states across the nation, according to a new report by a lobbying watchdog.

<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12302/reports-expose-extreme-pressure-groups-masquerading-think-tanks" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Center for Media and Democracy asserts</a> [3] that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 thinktanks based in each of the 50 states, is acting as a largely beneath-the-radar lobbying machine for major corporations and rightwing donors.

Its policies include cutting taxes, opposing climate change regulations, advocating reductions in labour protections and the minimum wage, privatising education, restricting voter rights and lobbying for the tobacco industry.

The network’s $83.2m annual warchest comes from major donors. These include the Koch brothers, the energy tycoons who are a mainstay of Tea Party groups and climate change sceptics; the tobacco company Philip Morris and its parent company Altria Group; the food giant Kraft; and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

More surprisingly, backers also include Facebook and Microsoft, as well as the telecoms giants AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

The CMD study uncovered a public document that listed SPN’s funders in 2010. They included: AT&T and Microsoft, which each donated up to $99,000; and Time Warner Cable and Verizon, which each contributed up to $24,000. In addition, Facebook, Microsoft and Time Warner each sponsored SPN’s most recent annual meeting in Oklahoma City in September.

Lisa Graves, the director of the Center for Media and Democracy, said it was “disappointing” that Facebook and the other technology and telecoms companies had “put their hat in the ring, given SPN’s extreme agenda that includes climate change denial, making it harder for Americans to vote, and attacking workers’ rights.” She called on the firms to “reconsider their support, as it is at odds with science and common sense.”

Tracie Sharp, the president of SPN, rebutted the charge that it operates as a rightwing lobbying network. In a statement, she said that the network was dedicated to providing “state-based, free-market thinktanks with the academic and management resources required to run a non-profit institution”. Each of its 64 member thinktanks were “fiercely independent, choosing to manage their staff, pick their own research topics and educate the public on those issues they deem most appropriate for their state.”

But she added that “every thinktank, however, rallies around a common belief: the power of free markets and free people to create a healthy, prosperous society.”

The State Policy Network operates a <a href="http://www.spn.org/publications/detail/spn-tech-telecom-policy-exchange-august-2013" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">tech/telecom policy exchange</a> [4] in which it campaigns against taxes on internet shopping and against the regulatory activities of the Federal Communications Commission. Though much of that thinking could not reasonably be characterised as what the CMD report calls an “extreme rightwing agenda”, the tech and telecoms companies' inclusion on the list of funders puts them alongside some strange bedfellows.

The Guardian invited the technology and telecoms companies to respond to the allegation that they have sponsored a network devoted to “extreme” rightwing causes, but most either declined to comment or had not responded by the time of publication.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Microsoft said: “As a large company, Microsoft has great interest in the many policy issues discussed across the country. We have a longstanding record of engaging with a broad assortment of groups on a bipartisan basis, both at the national and local level. In regard to State Policy Network, Microsoft has focused our participation on their technology policy work group because it is valuable forum to hear various perspectives about technology challenges and to share potential solutions.”

SPN works in parallel with the American Legislative Exchange Council, Alec, a forum that brings together largely Republican legislators and corporations to devise model bills that are used to attack workers’ rights in various US states.

The Koch brothers have donated directly to the network either personally or through corporate funds from Koch Industries and from family foundations. Two closely-related funds, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">described by Mother Jones as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement”</a> [5], give at least $1.5m a year – channeling money to the network from individual donors whose identity the funds obscure.

Several prominent rightwing billionaire donors are also involved, including Art Pope, an ally of the Koch brothers; the Walton family of Walmart, which funds SPN members in Arkansas, California, Massachusetts and Washington state; the foundation of billionaire Republican donor Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Searle Freedom Trust, created out of the fortune of the creator of NutraSweet, which funds a number of conservative causes.

Graves said that the individual thinktanks who make up SPN present themselves as “neutral, non-partisan groups, but are in fact part of a national network to project the voices and interests of some of the most powerful corporations and families in the country”.

Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that SPN groups were actively targeting the rights of often non-unionised employees. His research had uncovered attempts to expand the use of child labour, cut the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefit, make it harder to sue employers for sex or race discrimination, or even to police wage theft where companies refused to pay workers over-time or any wages at all.

“These are a very dramatic package of proposals at a time of economic hardship, and they are being rolled out in a cookie-cutter fashion from state to state, and affecting the lives of working people across the country.”

Lafer added: “This looks like scholarship from local organisations, but in fact it is neither – neither scholarship, nor local.”

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">See more stories tagged with:</div>

<div class="field-item even" style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/facebook-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">facebook</a> [6],</div>

<div class="field-item odd" style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/microsoft-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">microsoft</a> [7],</div>

<div class="field-item even" style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/state-policy-network" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">State Policy Network</a> [8],</div>

<div class="field-item odd" style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change-denial-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">climate change denial</a> [9]</div>

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<div class="print-source_url" style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Source URL: <a href="http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/facebook-and-microsoft-help-fund-right-wing-lobby-effort" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/facebook-and-microsoft-help-fund-right-wing-lobby-effort</a></div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Links:</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-pilkington</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[3] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12302/reports-expose-extreme-pressure-groups-masquerading-think-tanks</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[4] http://www.spn.org/publications/detail/spn-tech-telecom-policy-exchange-august-2013</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[5] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/facebook-0</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/microsoft-0</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/state-policy-network</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change-denial-0</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</div>

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<span class="timestamp published" title="2011-05-26T09:43:42+00:00" style="text-align: left; margin-top: 15px; font-weight: bold; display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; text-transform: uppercase; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal;">MAY 26, 2011, 9:43 AM

<h3 class="entry-title" style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left; margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook Taps Joel Kaplan to Head Washington Office</h3>

<address class="byline author vcard" style="font-weight: bold; text-align: left; margin-bottom: 12px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/author/evelyn-m-rusli/" class="url fn" title="See all posts by EVELYN M. RUSLI" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;">EVELYN M. RUSLI</a> and <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/author/peter-lattman/" class="url fn" title="See all posts by PETER LATTMAN" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;">PETER LATTMAN</a></address>

In an effort to expand its power base in the nation’s capital, Facebook has hired Joel Kaplan, an executive vice president at the Texas utility giant Energy Future Holdings, to head the company’s office in Washington. COAL, BROOKS BROS

It is a significant coup for the fast-growing social network, which is seeking to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/technology/29facebook.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">increase its influence</a> among policy makers and lawmakers.

Over the last few years, Facebook has started to fill its ranks with executives with deep ties to Washington. Its current chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, was a former chief of staff to a Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration. And its general counsel, Ted Ullyot, was a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/antonin_scalia/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">Antonin Scalia</a>.

[[Ullyot has had some amazing legal jobs over the years: law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, partner at Kirkland & Ellis, associate White House counsel, general counsel for AOL Time Warner Europe, and GC of Facebook. Where is he headed next?]]

With the addition of Mr. Kaplan, a former member of President George W. Bush’s White House staff, Facebook will likely strengthen its ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“It’s imperative that we scale our policy team so that we have the resources in place to demonstrate to policy makers that we are industry leaders in privacy, data security and safety,” Facebook said in a statement on Thursday.

In some ways, Mr. Kaplan’s move from the private-equity-owned Energy Future Holdings, formerly TXU, symbolizes the emergence of social media as the new “new thing.”

It also shows how Silicon Valley and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/venture_capital/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">venture capital</a> have re-established themselves as the hottest movers in the deal world, while the private equity industry has lost some of its luster.

When Mr. Kaplan left the Bush administration, he took a job working for private equity firms at Energy Future Holdings. In 2007, at the market peak, a group including <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/kohlberg_kravis_roberts_and_co/index.html?inline=nyt-org" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company</a>, TPG Capital and <a href="http://dealbook.on.nytimes.com/public/overview?symbol=GS&inline=nyt-org" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">Goldman Sachs</a> paid $44 billion for the company.

Today, those private equity firms are sitting on billions of dollars of losses. Energy Future Holdings has struggled with persistently low natural gas prices and a heavy debt burden. The promise of an initial public offering for the company has been put off indefinitely.

As the staid Texas utility has suffered, Facebook, arguably the hottest company in America, has grown at a breakneck pace, and an I.P.O. is expected next year.

Mr. Kaplan served as the deputy chief of staff in the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;">George W. Bush</a> White House, helping to manage the administration’s policy agenda. At Energy Future Holdings, Mr. Kaplan was responsible for handling the company’s public policy and external affairs.

Facebook also announced on Thursday that it had hired Myriah Jordan, who recently served as general counsel to Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina.

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packer:

Horowitz—who is the son of David Horowitz, the radical turned conservative polemicist—attributed Silicon Valley’s strain of libertarianism to the mentality of engineers. “Libertarianism is, theoretically, a relatively elegant solution,” he said. “People here have a great affinity for that kind of thing—they want elegance. Most people here are relatively apolitical and not that knowledgeable about how these large complicated systems of societies work. Libertarianism has got a lot of the false positives that Communism had, in that it’s a very simple solution that solves everything.” The intellectual model is not the dour Ayn Rand but Bay Area philosophers and gurus who imagine that limitless progress can be achieved through technology. Stewart Brand, now seventy-four, popularized the term “personal computer” and made “hacker” the tech equivalent of freedom fighter. His Whole Earth Catalog—a compendium of hippie products, generated by users, that is now considered an analog precursor of the Web—can still be found on desks at Facebook.

In the past fifteen years or so, Andreessen explained, Silicon Valley’s hands-off attitude has changed, as the industry has grown larger and its activities keep colliding with regulations. Technology leaders began to realize that Washington could sometimes be useful to them. “A small number of very high-end Valley people have got involved in politics, but in a way that a lot of us think is relentlessly self-interested,” Andreessen said. The issues that first animated these technology executives were stock options, subsidies, and tax breaks. “They started giving the Valley a bad name in Washington—that the Valley was just another special-interest group.”

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In early 2011, Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and other Silicon Valley moguls attended a dinner with President Obama in Woodside, at the home of John Doerr, a venture capitalist with ties to the Democratic Party. Instead of having a wide-ranging discussion, the tech leaders focussed narrowly on pet issues. John Chambers, of Cisco, kept pushing for a tax holiday on overseas profits that are reinvested in the United States. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, while Chambers was lobbying Obama, over cod and lentil salad, Zuckerberg turned to Valerie Jarrett, the President’s adviser, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?” When it was Jobs’s turn, he asked for more H-1B visas for foreign students who earn engineering degrees in the U.S.—a longtime Silicon Valley desire. Obama told him that the issue could be addressed only in the context of broader immigration reforms, such as allowing children who had arrived here illegally with their parents to gain legal status.

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Zuckerberg came away from the gathering impressed with Obama but sorely disappointed in his own industry. The most dynamic sector of the American economy had no larger agenda.

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Zuckerberg spoke about his concerns with Green, who said that the country’s biggest challenge was to equip more Americans to benefit from the Information Age. With so many jobs lost to automation, and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands, that prospect was slipping farther away. Silicon Valley was racing into the future, but the kinds of people Green had interviewed in Louisville were becoming increasingly marginal. Fixing this dynamic would require the expertise, the time, and the money of technology leaders. “How do we move America into the knowledge economy?” Green asked me. “And how do we create a voice for the knowledge community that is about the future and not selfish? If we organize this community, it could be one of the most powerful voices in politics.” He dropped the idea of selflessness. “I think our selfish interest actually aligns with the broader interest of creating jobs and growing the economy.”

</div>

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg began teaching a class on entrepreneurship, one afternoon a week, to middle-school students in a poor community near Facebook’s headquarters. He decided to ask his students about their college plans. One young man said that he might not be able to attend college, because he and his parents had illegally entered the country, from Mexico, when he was a baby. The story stuck with Zuckerberg. After the Republican losses in the 2012 elections, comprehensive immigration reform—including more H-1B visas—suddenly seemed possible in Washington. It also looked like the most promising issue for technology leaders to organize around—a case of self-interest aligning with the broader interest.

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Zuckerberg and Green began talking to Silicon Valley leaders about starting a political-advocacy group: Andreessen; Horowitz; Reid Hoffman; Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo; Eric Schmidt, of Google; and at least three dozen others. The interest was strong, as if they had all been waiting for something like this. Though Andreessen and Horowitz didn’t join the project, Andreessen thought it represented “the maturation of the industry” and a greater level of engagement in politics—“deeper, longer-term, with, frankly, more money.”

Hoffman, who believes that immigration reform would right a wrong and also create new jobs at every level, from software engineers to dry cleaners, told Zuckerberg, “The normal Silicon Valley thing is to focus on high-end visas and say, ‘The rest of it’s not my problem.’ ”

“Yes,” Zuckerberg said. “But there’s this huge moral component. We might as well go after all of it.”

“O.K., good,” Hoffman said. “I’m in.”

</div>

Earlier this year, Green wrote up a fifteen-page plan—subsequently leaked to Politico—which had more to do with tapping Silicon Valley’s potential as a political force than with the issue of immigration. One section of the text listed several reasons that “people in tech” could be organized into “one of the most powerful political forces,” including, “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.” This spring, the founders held a dinner, and pledged money from their personal fortunes; reportedly, the collective goal was fifty million dollars. A staff was hired in San Francisco, and political consultants from both parties were engaged in Washington. One afternoon last month, Green sat on the sunny rooftop terrace of a friend’s town house in Pacific Heights, just south of the Presidio, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin hills. He was barefoot, in jeans and a red T-shirt, with his left leg propped on a decorative rock bowl and immobilized in a brace. (He had broken it skiing.) A young assistant named Manny brought water and walnuts. Green’s frizzy hair fluttered in the wind blowing off the ocean as he worked his phone and his MacBook Air, which was decorated with a sticker that said, “The Dream Is Now.” An op-ed by Zuckerberg was going to run in the Washington Post the next morning, announcing the formation of a new group in Silicon Valley, called FWD.us. “I’m the president of the organization,” Green said. “There will be an actual office.” He was returning to his first passion, political organizing. His wide, stubbly face broke into a smile: he had spent ten years trying to convince Zuckerberg that politics matters, and he had finally done it.

</div>

==

<div style=" line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Immigration has been <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/03/zuckerberg-creating-a-shadow-money.html" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">a particular interest</a> to Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the company's spending on lobbying, much of it related to immigration, <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000033563&year=2011" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">is on track to blow away its 2012 spending</a>. Fittingly, the single biggest recipient of cash from the PAC was Sen. <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00030608" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Michael Bennet</a> (D-Colo.), a key figure in negotiations to get the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/06/computer-industry-unions-big-donors-to-immigration-bill-supporters.html" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">recent immigration bill</a> passed in the Senate. Bennet, a member of the so-called "Gang of 8," has long been a proponent of overhauling immigration rules, and in particular visa programs to bring more high-tech workers to the United States. That's a particular interest of Facebook and other high-tech companies. </div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In total, Bennet picked up $10,000 from Facebook's PAC -- $5,000 to his campaign committee and $5,000 to his leadership PAC.</div>

</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The PAC also gave the maximum of $5,000 to other members of the Gang of 8, including $5,000 each to the leadership PACs of Sen.<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n00001093" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Chuck Schumer</a> (D-N.Y.) and Sen. <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00030612" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Marco Rubio</a> (R-Fla.). The PAC donated to $16,000 to five members of the 13 members of the Senate's subcommittee on immigration, refugees and border security.</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Congressional leadership, whose help will be needed to bring an immigration bill through the House -- if it goes through the House -- and ultimately reconcile it with the already passed Senate version, were also lavished with donations. The PAC maxed out to House Minority Leader <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00007360" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Nancy Pelosi</a> (D-Calif.), Speaker <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/07/www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00003675" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">John Boehner</a> (R-Ohio), Majority Whip <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/07/www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00013131" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Eric Cantor</a> (R-Va.), Senate Majority Leader<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/07/www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n00009922" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Harry Reid</a> (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/07/www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n00003389" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">Mitch McConnell </a>(R-Ky.)</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Among the donors to the PAC were Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who both made the maximum annual donation of $5,000. Other top company executives, like Andrew Bosworth, Dan Rose, Lori Goler and Michael Buckley, made similar donations of $5,000 along with their respective spouses. Facebook's chief operating officer Cheryl Sandberg also donated $5,000.</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In total, in the first six months of the year, Facebook execs donated just over $200,000 to the PAC. After the $115,000 in donations and other expenses, the PAC still has $155,000 in cash on hand. The PAC was founded on Dec. 28, 2011, and made its <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/02/facebook-fires-up.html" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(99, 101, 99);">first major donations last spring</a>.

</div>

</div>

<h4 class="entry-categories-header" style="margin: 0px 0.25em 0px 0px; padding: 0px; clear: left; display: inline;">Categories:</h4>

<li class="entry-category" style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/influence-lobbying/industries/computersinternet/" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Computers/Internet</a>,</li>

</ul>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/influence-lobbying/industries/" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Industries</a></div>

</li>

</ul>

</div>

<li class="entry-tag" style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Chuck%20Schumer&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Chuck Schumer</a></li>

</ul>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Eric%20Cantor&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Eric Cantor</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Facebook&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Facebook</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Harry%20Reid&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Harry Reid</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=immigration%20reform&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">immigration reform</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=John%20Boehner&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">John Boehner</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Marco%20Rubio&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Marco Rubio</a>,</div>

</li>

<li class="entry-tag" style=" margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Mark%20Zuckerberg&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Mark Zuckerberg</a>,</li>

<li class="entry-tag" style=" margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=michael%20bennet&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">michael bennet</a>,</li>

</ul>

</div>

<ul>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Mitch%20McConnell&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Mitch McConnell</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Nancy%20Pelosi&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Nancy Pelosi</a>,</div>

</li>

<div style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/MT/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=8&tag=Russ%20Choma&limit=20&IncludeBlogs=8" rel="tag" style=" outline: none; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Russ Choma</a></div>

</li>

</ul>

</div>

===

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/print/teenager-commits-suicide-after-police-launch-social-media-campaign-against-him">http://www.alternet.org/print/teenager-commits-suicide-after-police-launch-social-media-campaign-against-him</a></div>

funds cei with google <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-jim-ball/google-competitive-enterprise-institute_b_3480309.html?ir=Green">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-jim-ball/google-competitive-enterprise-institute_b_3480309.html?ir=Green</a>

===

==

fbrape# pressure cave on women 5/13

===

zuck

On February 14, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hosted a political fundraiser in his Palo Alto, California home for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R). For those unfamiliar with the pairing, Zuckerberg and Christie first teamed up in 2010 when Zuckerberg donated <a target="blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/education/23newark.html?r=0">$100 million</a> to the Newark school system.

The event was met with controversy, however, as 40 people <a target="blank" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/mark-zuckerberg-chris-christie_n_2683074.html">protested</a> Chris Christie’s budget cut of <a target="blank" href="http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/04/cory-booker/cory-booker-blasts-chris-christie-slashing-funding/">$7.5 million</a> in funding for Planned Parenthood. Demonstrators claimed that the Republican governor is anti-women and chastised Zuckerberg for supporting him. This critique was a bit disingenuous as Christie <a target="_blank" href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/21/10-revelations-from-new-chris-christie-biography/">donated</a> to Planned Parenthood in 1994 while opposing public funding for it in his run for Freeholder of Morris County.

In response, Facebook spokesman <a target="_blank" href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/chris-christies-guests-california-fundraising-swing/story?id=18514503">Andrew Noyes stated</a>, “Mark and Priscilla have worked closely with Governor Christie on education reform in the Newark school system. They admire his leadership on education reform and other issues and look forward to continuing their important work together on behalf of Newark’s school children.”

The fundraiser is an important breakthrough for Governor Christie as it demonstrated his ability to appeal beyond the traditional Republican base. Zuckerberg is listed as “<a target="blank" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2013/01/24/facebook-ceo-to-host-christie-fundraiser/">no preference</a>” for political party under the Santa Clara registrar of voters (and there’s no mention of it on his Facebook page). The Facebook CEO hosted a town-hall style <a target="blank" href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/obama-and-facebook-in-warm-embrace/">meeting</a> for Obama in 2011, as well.

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cycle=2012&cmte=C00502906">Facebook’s PAC</a> is careful to donate to candidates on both sides of the aisle. It has donated to Republican House Speaker John Boehner and senators Marco Rubio (R-Fl.), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). Beneficiaries from the Democratic Party include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and senators Chris Coons (D-DE), and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

As the 2012 <a target="blank" href="http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance">presidential election</a> showed, previous fundraising norms are obsolete and candidates are far better off relying on private contributions than agreeing to the public financing system for campaigns. Obama and Romney each raised and spent almost <a target="blank" href="http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance">$1 billion</a> this past election season.

Since launching his campaign in December, Christie has raised over <a target="_blank" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323940004578258242615179624.html?KEYWORDS=christie">$2 million</a>, including $1.6 million from 420 people who donated the state allowed maximum of $3,800. This does not include donations under $300, donations in the month of February, or the governor’s haul from the aforementioned fundraiser with Zuckerberg. Likewise, Christie’s national popularity will help him substantially in the gubernatorial race and provide a substantial base of donors to return to should he run for president in 2016.

For any potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, the ability to appeal to the moderate undecided voter base is absolutely crucial. With New Jersey’s Republican governor reaping in the benefits of networking in Silicon Valley, the rest of the GOP should learn from Christie. The conservative base is not the only place where the Republican Party can raise money, especially when the politically unaffiliated have deep pockets as well.

</div>

----

I asked Sassoon, fresh off his Pulitzer win, what he thought of the news of Koch Industries potentially bidding on the Tribune Company newspapers. "We reported on the Kochs' involvement in the tar sands, and they played hardball to try to shut us up," he wrote in an email."They pressured Reuters to drop us as a content partner, and ran ads on Google andFacebook calling me liar…. What we've experienced of them firsthand makes me think they would not be trustworthy stewards of the honorable traditions of journalism."

occupy phoenix

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Brenda the Facebook Queen</div>

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Stalking Discontented Citizens Through the</div>

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Internet Data Mine, Christmas TLO alerts and</div>

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tiananmen Square-Tested Facial Recognition</div>

<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Technology</div>

--

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire eco-entrepreneur <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/elon-musk-spacex_n_2727312.html" target="hplink">Elon Musk</a> <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/10/net-us-usa-immigration-technology-idUSBRE94910K20130510" target="hplink">announced</a> on Friday that he was quitting Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's immigration advocacy group, upset over its controversial political strategy.

Fwd.us told The Huffington Post that a second funder also had decided to withdraw. Several media outlets have <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130510/elon-musk-and-david-sacks-depart-fwd-us-mark-zuckerbergs-political-action-group/" target="hplink">reported</a> that David Sacks, founder of the business networking site Yammer and a former colleague of Musk's, had <a href="http://preview.reuters.com/2013/5/10/exclusive-elon-musk-quits-zuckerbergs-1" target="hplink">dropped off the list</a> of the group's supporters.

Zuckerberg started <a href="http://FWD.us" target="hplink" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fwd.us</a> to press for <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/the-circuit-mark-zuckerberg-launches-fwdus-to-lobby-on-immigration-reform/2013/04/11/2fa308f8-a2c3-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_blog.html" target="hplink" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">comprehensive immigration reform</a>. But the group has been <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/progressive-ads-facebook-mark-zuckerberg_n_3229848.html" target="hplink" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">heavily criticized</a> by some immigration reform supporters in recent weeks for its television ad campaign <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-mark-zuckerbergs-fwdus-in-heated-controversy-over-political-ads-20130501,0,3872520.story" target="hplink" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">praising lawmakers</a> for backing projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Fwd.us has argued that the ads were meant to <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/liberal-groups-strike-back-at-facebook-91002.html?hp=t2_3" target="_hplink">give home district support</a> to lawmakers backing immigration reform.

In a statement to AllThingsD on Friday, Musk, the founder of the electric carmaker Tesla Motors, made clear he was unhappy with the pro-oil ads.

“I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration," Musk said. "However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes. I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in D.C. and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130510/elon-musk-and-david-sacks-depart-fwd-us-mark-zuckerbergs-political-action-group/" target="_hplink">argue the merits of that cause</a>. This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.”

Fwd.us retains the <a href="http://www.fwd.us/our_supporters" target="_hplink">backing</a> of other Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Bill Gates.

The withdrawal of Musk and Sacks comes just days after a coalition of progressive groups announced that they were temporarily <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/progressive-ads-facebook-mark-zuckerberg_n_3229848.html" target="_hplink">pulling all their ads</a> from Facebook in protest.

“Leaders in the technology community have every right to talk about how immigration reform will benefit their businesses," former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) said in a statement on Tuesday. "But instead, Fwd.us has chosen a strategy that’s condescending to voters and counterproductive to the cause of reform."

The seven-figure Fwd.us ad campaign ran for a week in seven states, but it is no longer on the air.

Fwd.us spokeswoman Kate Hansen told HuffPost, "We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy -- and we're grateful for the continued support of our dedicated founders and major contributors. Fwd.us remains totally committed to supporting a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform."

As The Huffington Post reported in February, Musk is a significant -- but not top-tier -- <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/elon-musk-spacex_n_2727312.html" target="_hplink">donor to Democrats</a>. He also contributes to Republicans.

===

The effort is being led by former Sen. Russ Feingold's (D-Wis.) Progressives United, and joined by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, CREDO, Daily Kos, Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, 350.org and Presente. The groups announced on Tuesday that they would either pull the Facebook ads they've already paid for or hold purchases of new ads for a minimum of two weeks in response to the tactics of Zuckerberg's new political organization, FWD.us.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/progressive-ads-facebook-mark-zuckerberg_n_3229848.html?ir=Green

===

joel kaplan of firstenergy

===

Activist cell-phone company CREDO tried to run an advertisement on Facebook calling on Facebook’s founder to stop running TV ads that support the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Guess whether the social media giant liked that idea.

Facebook quickly rejected the ad, saying it violated its advertising policies.

<a href="http://grist.org/news/mark-zuckerbergs-political-group-funds-ads-promoting-keystone-and-anwr-drilling/" target="blank">We told you last week</a> about <a href="http://www.fwd.us/landing?splash=1" target="blank">FWD.US</a>, a political group cofounded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to push for immigration reform. One of the group’s subsidiaries is running an ad praising Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in which Graham voices his support for Keystone XL and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, along with his opposition to “ObamaCare.” The ad is apparently attempting to bolster the lawmaker’s support among conservatives, which is jeopardized by his support of immigration reform. An ad financed by another FWD.US subsidiary supports Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), praising him for pursuing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But Facebook does not want its billion or so users hearing from its opponents on this issue.

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-rejects-ad-criticizing-actions-of-zuckerberg-political-group/2013/04/30/d41b9bb0-b1ba-11e2-bbf2-a6f9e9d79e19_story.html" target="_blank">From The Washington Post</a>:

The ad was rejected when CREDO tried to post it to the social network. According to an e-mail the company received from Facebook, the ad violates Facebook policies because it uses Zuckerberg’s image.

Facebook policies do state that it will reject ads that contain Facebook logos, icons or trademarked images in a way that falls outside of its usage guidelines or if the advertisements incorrectly imply the social network has given its “partnership, sponsorship or endorsement” to the ad.

In a statement, Facebook said it generally rejects “ads that contain Mark’s image because — not surprisingly — in our experience those ads tend to be confusing for users, and frequently misleading. Users may click on the ad thinking it is a message from Mark or from Facebook, not understanding that they are actually in an advertisement seeking to take advantage of Mark’s image.”

</blockquote>

CREDO isn’t the only group taking to Facebook to object to the Graham and Begich ads. <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-group-keystone-oil-ads-90752.html" target="_blank">From Politico</a>:

The Sierra Club is taking a similar approach. The environmental group encouraged its members Monday to share a note that says, “Zuckerberg promoting dirty fuels? DISLIKE.”

The critics say they are infuriated that a group backed by Zuckerberg and green-minded venture capitalists like John Doerr could be supporting ads that tout oil drilling.

</blockquote>

Meanwhile, Keystone XL opponents are <a href="http://www.ibabuzz.com/politics/2013/04/30/protesters-target-zuckerberg-at-facebook-hq/" target="_blank">planning a protest today</a> that will be harder for Facebook to simply squash. The protest will be conducted the old-fashioned way, in person, outside of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Go ahead and post this story on Facebook — the image of the banned advertisement should show up automatically. And let us know in our comment section below whether the Facebook overlords take it down.

Here is one of the television ads that has activists riled:

<h1 class="title-blog" style=" text-align: left;">A Bad Bargain</h1>

<div class="blog_padding relative" data-beacon="{" p="p" mnid="mnid" entrybyline="entryByline" style=" text-align: left; padding-top: 15px;">Posted: 05/02/2013 2:14 pm</div>

</div>

Mark Zuckerberg has not yet issued any response to public criticism that his political action group, FWD.us, is funding advertisements supporting construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Gulf of Mexico. FWD.us, co-founded by Zuckerberg with additional donations from a host of his fellow Silicon Valley superstars, has right-wing and left-wing subsidiaries working on parallel tracks to pass bipartisan immigration legislation. Those subsidiaries run advertisements for vulnerable Republicans and Democrats pledged to support that legislation. The ads generally don't mention immigration reform -- which is politically unpopular among conservatives -- and some of them include ringing endorsements for Big Oil's pet projects including Keystone XL. While immigration reform is an important cause, many Americans, particularly those of my generation, are uneasy with a strategy that seems to advocate sacrificing our planet's future as an iffy wager for the bill's passage.

Mr. Zuckerberg -- a hero to many young people -- has in the past been eloquent in his support for transitioning from fossil fuels to knowledge-powered and New Energy economies.

Now that his financial ties to the pro tar sands advertisements are public knowledge, many of us who want a brighter, cleaner future for America and who admire his other accomplishments hope Mr. Zuckerberg will disassociate himself from their dubious content. There are already enough billionaires advocating for Keystone XL and Big Oil's other criminal enterprises. Anti-Keystone XL activists have written a million letters to President Obama. We have appeared, 40,000 strong, to demonstrate against Keystone in Washington, D.C. and we have engaged in peaceful civil disobedience by the thousands in locales from Texas to the White House gate. It's disheartening to see all the billionaires, including leaders of our own generation, lined up against us.

It's our great and only hope that President Obama will listen to the voice of democracy and -- acting as a trustee for the future generations --- kill the pipeline. He promised in his rousing inaugural address, to make the battle to save the planet from climate chaos the centerpiece of his second administration. The Keystone decision is one of the few climate change issues solely under his control. To plug Keystone, President Obama needn't genuflect to a Congress awash in democracy polluting oil money. He can do it while sitting alone in the Oval Office. We worry that President Obama, instead, will simply count the fat cats and weigh their furor -- or their indifference -- rather than reading his mail.

If Mr. Zuckerberg favors or is genuinely ambivalent about Keystone, here are seven reasons why he should reconsider:

1) The Keystone XL Pipeline will never be safe. Tar sands oil, sometimes known as bitumen, causes corrosion and the industry has not figured out how to stop it from bursting even the most state-of-the-art pipelines such as the first Keystone pipeline that leaked over a dozen times in its first year of operation. On March 31, an Exxon pipe carrying 95,000 barrels per day of Alberta tar sands oil from Illinois to Texas refineries burst and flooded a Mayflower, Arkansas, suburb beneath a river of heavy crude and lighter diluents, added by oil companies to move the gelatinous bitumen through the pipe. Arkansas taxpayers were shocked to learn that thanks to a loophole artfully created by the industry's political allies, they -- not the oil kingpins -- will have to pay for much of the cleanup.

That same week, a Canadian company spilled 30,000 gallons of Alberta crude in Minnesota. In 2010, an Exxon pipeline in Michigan spewed a million gallons of Alberta dilbit into the Kalamazoo River, causing the worst and most expensive pipeline oil spill in U.S. history. Experts are still wondering how to restore the Kalamazoo. Clean-up crews who commonly use floating booms to remediate aquatic oil spills learned that tar sands oil doesn't float! Instead, the toxic tar sands sludge permeated and sealed the Kalamazoo River bottom ravaging the foundation of its aquatic ecosystem.

In fact, even oil and gas companies shipping conventional oil, experience thousands of oil spills each year. In June, an Exxon pipe that runs parallel to the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline burst, spilled upwards of 42,000 barrels, at a crossing on the iconic Yellowstone River killing life in that blue ribbon trout fishery and national treasure for 25 miles.

Given the industry's abysmal record, it's safe to say that Keystone XL will experience a major spill and, due to its planned route, that spill will almost certainly contaminate the Ogallala aquifer, the sole water supply for millions of middle state Americans as well as the breadbasket of American agriculture and the ranching industry in seven states.

2) Keystone XL will not create significant American jobs. According to the State Department's study, Keystone will provide only 35 full time jobs following the construction period. We could more beneficially create permanent jobs by incentivizing solar and wind development. Even with the current anemic federal incentives, solar and wind companies are creating each year, more new generation capacity than all the incumbents (oil, gas, coal and nuke) combined. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are already 93,000 jobs in solar and 85,000 in wind, and those numbers are growing exponentially.

3) Keystone XL will neither improve energy security nor lower gasoline prices. Virtually all of Keystone's Alberta tar sands oil is destined for overseas markets. Canadian and mostly non-U.S. owned oil services companies, the Koch Brothers, and Asian plutocrats will profit from the pipeline but there will be little value to the U.S. in terms of security or lower oil prices. In fact, U.S. oil prices will actually increase as the result of Keystone as that pipeline relieves the current glut of the landlocked tar sands in the US Midwest and Canada. Top economist Philip Verleger estimates that the average cost of American gasoline could actually rise upward of 5¢-10¢ per gallon if Keystone is constructed. The Pipeline will therefore hurt the U.S. economy, not help it.

4) If we kill Keystone, the oil companies will not build a pipeline elsewhere in Canada. Contrary to what the oil industry claims, alternative pipelines elsewhere in Canada are not moving forward. Resistance among Canadians in British Columbia, especially salmon-dependent First Nations, is even greater than here in the United States.

5) Without Keystone, the oil companies cannot simply haul their tar sands out of Alberta by rail and truck. The $7 billion Keystone pipeline will transport 1.1 million barrels each day -- far more than could be transported economically by rail and truck traffic. If we stop Keystone, we lock most of this carbon underground.

6) We don't need oil-based fossil fuels while we ramp up clean energy alternatives. Renewables like solar and wind are proven and market-ready technologies. Their widespread deployment is only being impeded by multibillion dollar annual subsidies to oil, coal and gas. And a mixture of fuel efficiency standards, transit, smart growth and alternative fuels has U.S. use of oil on a downward slope. In any case, the Keystone XL Pipeline is not a stop-gap measure. Instead the pipeline will entrench our use of fossil fuels for generations.

7) Keystone XL will have a catastrophic impact on climate change. The amount of carbon in the tar sands is equivalent to all the carbon in all the oil ever removed from Saudi Arabia. Burning the vast oceans of oil beneath Saudi Arabia has gotten us where we are today; ice caps melting, glaciers retreating on every continent, water supplies drying up, continent wide droughts disrupting agriculture and global food supplies, acidified oceans and rising sea levels, and climate chaos flooding our greatest cities. According to a new study published last week by Oil Change International, <a href="http://priceofoil.org/2013/04/16/cooking-the-books-the-true-climate-impact-of-keystone-xl/" target="_hplink">"Cooking the Books: How the State Department Analysis Ignores the True Climate Impact of the Keystone XL Pipeline</a>," the pipeline will emit 181 million tons of carbon every year -- the equivalent of 37.7 million cars or 51 new coal plants. There are 561 tons of carbon locked in Alberta's tar sands, more than twice the amount, according to former Goddard scientist James Hansen, than all the oil and combustion have released in the history of mankind. We can double that sum by burning Alberta's tar sands, but what genocidal politician or oilman, would want to do that to future generations? We could better solve our energy problems by scuttling the pipeline, cutting incentives to big oil, and leveling the playing field to let the cleaner, cheaper technology prevail in the free market.

Americans who want to stop Keystone XL Pipeline may outnumber those who favor the pipeline but we will never out-money them -- particularly when Mr. Zuckerberg and his legions of 21st century technology moguls take the side of Big Oil's 19th century robber barons. Without some disavowed, young clean energy advocates who regard Mr. Zuckerberg as an iconic leader of our generation are apt to view his investment in the opposition to be not only disheartening, but treacherous.

<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/?mobile=nc">http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/?mobile=nc</a>

...

FWD.US is bankrolling two subsidiary organizations to purchase TV ads to advance the overarching agenda — one run by veteran Republican political operatives and one led by Democratic strategists. The GOP-lead group, called <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/www.americansforaconservativedirection.com">Americans For A Conservative Direction</a>, has created an ad in support of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) which praises him for supporting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded drilling elsewhere. The ad, which does not mention immigration policy, also attacks Obamacare, “wasteful stimulus spending,” and “seedy Chicago-style politics.” Politico reports the group plans a <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-group-launches-tv-blitz-90511.html" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">seven-figure buy</a> with this and other ads.

Watch the ad:

The other group, called <a href="http://www.councilforamericanjobgrowth.com/">Council for American Job Growth</a> and purportedly intended to appeal to liberals, lauds Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) for “working to open ANWR to drilling.” The ad also does not mention immigration reform but does highlight Begich’s support of a balanced budget amendment.

Watch the spot:

The group’s forceful advocacy for expanded drilling and pipeline construction is surprising given Zuckerberg’s public statements about the purpose of the group. In an <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-immigrants-are-the-key-to-a-knowledge-economy/2013/04/10/aba05554-a20b-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html">introductory column</a>, Zuckerberg said that the group would be dedicated to “building the knowledge economy,” which he contrasts to “the economy of the last century… primarily based on natural resources.” Zuckerberg adds, “there are only so many oil fields, and there is only so much wealth that can be created from them for society.”

Both ads appear to be trying to give political cover to vulnerable centrists, in hopes of ensuring their support for major immigration reform — though Graham’s support seems certain as he is a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/31/gang-of-eight-immigration_n_2988656.html">member of the Gang of Eight</a> pushing the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/16/1869591/senate-immigration-bill/">measure.</a> But the proposals already enjoy <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/25/1920881/poll-republicans-strongly-support-of-gang-of-eights-immigration-reform-bill/">broad popularity</a> among both Republicans and the public overall.

In the past, Zuckerberg has <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/climate/a-facebook-message-from-mark-zuckerberg/blog/26533/">emphasized</a> the importance of moving from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy.

<h5 style=" text-align: left;">Update</h5>

Kate Hansen, communications director for FWD.US told ThinkProgress: “FWD.us is committed to showing support for elected officials who promote the policy changes needed to build the knowledge economy. Maintaining two separate entities, Americans for a Conservative Direction & the Council for American Job Growth, to support elected officials across the political spectrum – separately – means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audiences of their constituents.”

</div>

<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/">ThinkProgress has the story</a>:

Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called <a href="http://www.fwd.us/" style=" font-weight: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FWD.US</a>. …

</blockquote>

Both of those subsidiary groups have put out ads that praise efforts to expand the oil industry — by increasing offshore oil drilling as well as building Keystone XL and opening up ANWR. The ads don’t even mention immigration, but instead “appear to be trying to give political cover to vulnerable centrists, in hopes of ensuring their support for major immigration reform,” ThinkProgress writes.

So much for <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-immigrants-are-the-key-to-a-knowledge-economy/2013/04/10/aba05554-a20b-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html">all that talk</a> about shifting from an old, dirty, fossil-fuel-driven economy to a new, clean, knowledge-based one.

<h3 style=" text-align: left;">Source</h3>

</div>

<li style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/" target="_blank">Mark Zuckerberg’s New Political Group Spending Big On Ads Supporting Keystone XL And Oil Drilling</a>, ThinkProgress</li>

</ul>

</div>

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on <a href="http://twitter.com/lisahymas">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://plus.google.com/106507937998378546064">Google+</a>.

==

Before he left to found a venture capital firm, Social+Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya was Facebook's longest-tenured senior executive. He remains close with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

He stopped by BI headquarters yesterday.

He told us that he'd give Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg an "A-/B+" for his performance since last year's IPO.

Palihapitiya said that he's worried Facebook is getting lost in incremental "feature creep" – and that it should be focusing on "ground-breaking new products."

He suggested Facebook should think about solving problems in healthcare, education, or maybe even bringing Bitcoin into the mainstream.

<h4 class="meta" style="text-align: left;">04:45 PM - November 9, 2011</h4>

<h3 class="title" style="text-align: left;">The Kochs and Keystone XL</h3>

InsideClimate fails to make its case about brothers’ interest in the pipeline—but it should keep trying

By <a href="http://www.cjr.org/author/curtis-brainard-1/">Curtis Brainard</a>

Koch Industries, a giant oil and energy conglomerate, has InsideClimate News, a four-year-old online news startup, in its crosshairs.

In October, the company launched an online ad campaign via Google, Facebook, and its KochFacts.com website (which rebuts coverage it finds unsatisfactory) claiming that InsideClimate “misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods” about Koch’s interest in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would transport crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Gulf Coast refineries in the US, and has drawn vigorous opposition from environmentalists. Koch’s ads feature a jaundiced image InsideClimate’s founder and publisher, David Sassoon, calling him the “activist/owner” of the site. Sassoon calls the ads “media intimidation.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called <a href="http://www.fwd.us/">FWD.US</a>. …

</blockquote>

Both of those subsidiary groups have put out ads that praise efforts to expand the oil industry — by expanding offshore oil drilling and well as building Keystone XL and opening up ANWR. The ads don’t even mention immigration, but instead “appear to be trying to give political cover to vulnerable centrists, in hopes of ensuring their support for major immigration reform,” ThinkProgress writes.

<h3 style=" text-align: left;">Source</h3>

</div>

</ul>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on <a href="http://twitter.com/lisahymas">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://plus.google.com/106507937998378546064">Google+</a>.</div>

</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including driling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.</div>

</section>

The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s co-founder Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called <a href="http://www.fwd.us/">FWD.US</a>. Its initial priority is the passage of a <a href="http://www.fwd.us/immigration_reform">comprehensive immigration reform bill</a>, including enhanced border security, more visas for workers with special skills, and a pathway to citizenship for those living in the U.S. without legal status. Other long-term <a href="http://www.fwd.us/about_us">priorities</a> for the group include education reform and expanded scientific research.

FWD.US is bankrolling two subsidiary organizations to purchase TV ads to advance the overarching agenda — one run by veteran Republican political operatives and one led by Democratic strategists. The GOP-lead group, called <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/www.americansforaconservativedirection.com">Americans For A Conservative Direction</a>, has created an ad in support of Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) which praises him for supporting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded drilling elsewhere. The ad, which does not mention immigration policy, also attacks Obamacare, “wasteful stimulus spending,” and “seedy Chicago-style politics.” Politico reports the group plans a <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-group-launches-tv-blitz-90511.html">seven-figure buy</a> with this and other ads.

Watch the ad:

The other group, called <a href="http://www.councilforamericanjobgrowth.com/">Council for American Job Growth</a> and purportedly intended to appeal to liberals, lauds Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) for “working to open ANWR to drilling.” The ad also does not mention immigration reform but does highlight Begich’s support of a balanced budget amendment.

Watch the spot:

<h5 style=" text-align: left;">Update</h5>

</div>

</div>

</div>

<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/?mobile=nc">http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark-zuckerbergs-new-political-group-spending-big-on-ads-supporting-keystone-xl-and-oil-drilling/?mobile=nc</a></div>

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