FACEBOOK 4 meta

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see zuck 2 SEE BROLIGARCHY dereg

SEE ZUCK THREE

see youtube

newSmax partner 7 26 instagrAM

merri ok

see joel kaplan dana white ufc

see instagram

see social media

see tax dodge

:{:{see soc media bias BS}: basis to chuck filter QA

see algorithm  amplify

see DISINFO misinfo EV offshore wind

see dark post paid ads duopoply with google? see cory d

stew peters

SEE MISINFO2

see de-platform --> fail

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see whistleblower  Haugen

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Meta

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

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what is FB policy for 2024 election?

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MSN 10 26

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company was found to have misled users about its privacy practices in a case related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal

The Wednesday ruling marks one of the largest-ever legal penalties for a tech giant — and just the latest court loss for Meta this year.

The company, then known as Facebook, disclosed in 2018 that the private information of as many as 87 million Facebook users was improperly obtained by political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm used that information to build profiles of American voters

New Mexico sued Facebook in 2021, accusing it of mishandling state residents’ personal information and deceiving those users about its policies in connection with the incident.

A jury found in September that Meta had violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. State District Court Judge Francis Mathew criticized the company for what he described as a “coherent strategy designed to mislead the public” in his Wednesday penalty decision.

“Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” Mathew wrote.

After Wednesday’s penalty decision, Meta said it will appeal the decision and has accused New Mexico’s attorney general of conflating privacy and speech issues.

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”

Meta’s legal battles threaten to strain its business, though court penalties and settlements remain relatively small compared to the company’s earnings so far.

The company reported earnings for the quarter ended in September on Wednesday, including lower quarterly profits than Wall Street had expected. It attributed the miss to a charge from the $18 billion multistate settlement it agreed to in August to resolve claims that its platforms have addicted and harmed young people.

New Mexico was not a party to that settlement, which also resolved the participating states’ outstanding claims related to Cambridge Analytica.

Meta posted income from operations of nearly $13 billion during the quarter, compared to nearly $23 billion that it said it would have earned without the settlement.

Meta CFO Susan Li said on a call with analysts following the earnings report that the company is monitoring “active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results,” including additional youth-related trials set for later this year and next.

Meta was also ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in a separate New Mexico case earlier this year over claims that its platforms addicted and harmed young people. Meta, along with YouTube, also lost a case in March in Los Angeles brought by a young woman with similar addiction and harm claims. The companies plan to appeal.

Meta earnings

Still, Meta’s business continues to grow at a strong clip thanks in large part to its investments in artificial intelligence. The company posted sales growth of 26% year-on-year to more than $64 billion in the quarter.

Meta’s stock (META) jumped more than 3% in after-hours trading following the report on Wednesday.

Meta launched its Muse AI personal assistant app in September. The app quickly rocketed to the top of app stores and has gained more than 10 million users, according to the company. It also launched its latest foundation model, Muse Wonder, last month.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents the Muse Charm at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 23. - Carlos Barria/Reuters

The company said Wednesday that its AI investments are boosting its core advertising business “through stronger engagement, better recommendations, and more efficient monetization.” Its average price per ad, a key metric for the company, jumped 14% year-over-year in the September quarter.

Across the industry, tech companies face questions about their heavy spending on AI infrastructure. Meta’s capital expenditures during the quarter reached nearly $35 billion, up 80% from the year-ago quarter. And the company narrowed its full-year capital expenditure guidance to between $135 billion to $145 billion, the upper end of the range it had previously provided. Meta declined to provide spending guidance for next year.

But investors are signaling they’re willing to give Meta some leeway, given the success of Muse, said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.

“The market has shifted from punishing Meta for spending to rewarding it for having a compelling product story,” Cohen wrote in emailed commentary.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

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10 26 meta apologize 4? hr block no kings 4, algo blamed?

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MSN 10 26

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company was found to have misled users about its privacy practices in a case related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal

The Wednesday ruling marks one of the largest-ever legal penalties for a tech giant — and just the latest court loss for Meta this year.

The company, then known as Facebook, disclosed in 2018 that the private information of as many as 87 million Facebook users was improperly obtained by political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm used that information to build profiles of American voters

New Mexico sued Facebook in 2021, accusing it of mishandling state residents’ personal information and deceiving those users about its policies in connection with the incident.

A jury found in September that Meta had violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. State District Court Judge Francis Mathew criticized the company for what he described as a “coherent strategy designed to mislead the public” in his Wednesday penalty decision.

“Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” Mathew wrote.

After Wednesday’s penalty decision, Meta said it will appeal the decision and has accused New Mexico’s attorney general of conflating privacy and speech issues.

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”

Meta’s legal battles threaten to strain its business, though court penalties and settlements remain relatively small compared to the company’s earnings so far.

The company reported earnings for the quarter ended in September on Wednesday, including lower quarterly profits than Wall Street had expected. It attributed the miss to a charge from the $18 billion multistate settlement it agreed to in August to resolve claims that its platforms have addicted and harmed young people.

New Mexico was not a party to that settlement, which also resolved the participating states’ outstanding claims related to Cambridge Analytica.

Meta posted income from operations of nearly $13 billion during the quarter, compared to nearly $23 billion that it said it would have earned without the settlement.

Meta CFO Susan Li said on a call with analysts following the earnings report that the company is monitoring “active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results,” including additional youth-related trials set for later this year and next.

Meta was also ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in a separate New Mexico case earlier this year over claims that its platforms addicted and harmed young people. Meta, along with YouTube, also lost a case in March in Los Angeles brought by a young woman with similar addiction and harm claims. The companies plan to appeal.

Meta earnings

Still, Meta’s business continues to grow at a strong clip thanks in large part to its investments in artificial intelligence. The company posted sales growth of 26% year-on-year to more than $64 billion in the quarter.

Meta’s stock (META) jumped more than 3% in after-hours trading following the report on Wednesday.

Meta launched its Muse AI personal assistant app in September. The app quickly rocketed to the top of app stores and has gained more than 10 million users, according to the company. It also launched its latest foundation model, Muse Wonder, last month.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents the Muse Charm at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 23. - Carlos Barria/Reuters

The company said Wednesday that its AI investments are boosting its core advertising business “through stronger engagement, better recommendations, and more efficient monetization.” Its average price per ad, a key metric for the company, jumped 14% year-over-year in the September quarter.

Across the industry, tech companies face questions about their heavy spending on AI infrastructure. Meta’s capital expenditures during the quarter reached nearly $35 billion, up 80% from the year-ago quarter. And the company narrowed its full-year capital expenditure guidance to between $135 billion to $145 billion, the upper end of the range it had previously provided. Meta declined to provide spending guidance for next year.

But investors are signaling they’re willing to give Meta some leeway, given the success of Muse, said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.

“The market has shifted from punishing Meta for spending to rewarding it for having a compelling product story,” Cohen wrote in emailed commentary.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

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BIG TECH OVERSIGHT BD 8 26

Trump's "Authoritarian Takeover" of the Media, ABC Suing FCC & the Meta Trial: Jessica González

Trump's "Authoritarian Takeover" of the Media, ABC Suing FCC & the Meta Trial: Jessica González

Aug 19, 2026 Latest Shows

Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de... We look at major media news with Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy organization Free Press. She discusses the landmark lawsuit against Meta for making its social media platforms addictive for young people, efforts to halt the Paramount-Warner Bros. megamerger, and Disney's lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over what it calls the Trump administration's "retaliatory campaign" against the ABC television network. González says President Donald Trump's "authoritarian takeover attempt of our media system" must be opposed. Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

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RWW 7 26

• Judd Legum and Noel Sims @ Popular Info: Meta will train its AI on far-right media outlet

This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announced it had struck a deal with Meta. Under the agreement, Meta will “draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the company was “pleased to work with Meta to help ensure users have access to timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.”

Newsmax's Greg Kelly: “This arrangement with Meta is going to be great for us, for them, and for you. And I think for me too, actually. I have a stake in this, big time.”

07/29/26

July 28, 2026, edition of Newsmax's Greg Kelly Reports

GREG KELLY (HOST): Newsmax and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, joining forces. A new partnership has been signed between these two great companies. Now, it will give Meta access to Newsmax's extensive content. This is a really big deal. Meta is one of the biggest online companies. And, again, yes, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Newsmax sees this partnership as just the beginning of its move into AI, and we are proud to be partnering with Meta. If you like more information, go to newsmaxinvest[dot]com, and you can find out what's happening here. The New York Stock Exchange — you know, we're sold publicly now. And this arrangement with Meta is going to be great for us, for them, and for you. And I think for me too, actually. I have a stake in this, big time.

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AN 4 26

In 2025, four major companies — Paramount, ABC, Meta (which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads), and the Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter — agreed to donate millions of dollars to fund Donald Trump's presidential library in Miami. Altogether, the donations totaled at least $63 million for the library, which according to President Trump, could double as a Trump-branded hotel.

Senate Democrats have been probing that $63 million, but according to The New Republic's Greg Sargent, a lot of questions remain unanswered.

"After the companies agreed to these shakedowns — sorry, settlements — the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last September," Sargent explains in an article published on April 20. "Since then, Senate Democrats have been asking: What happened to the money? Now, there's been an important new turn in this saga. The four companies have provided fresh information to Senate Democrats in written responses to their questions. For these Democrats, those responses — obtained by The New Republic — raise more questions than they answer."

Sargent, a former Washington Post columnist, adds, "In these formal replies, all four companies confirmed that they did pledge that money to Trump's library — itself a notable development. More importantly, however, the Democrats say the responses reveal that the money is still largely unaccounted for."

According to Sargent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has "taken the lead in tracking this money."

"The companies all settled lawsuits with Trump after his 2024 victory — Paramount for $16 million over a claim of fraudulent editing by CBS; Meta for $25 million, and X for around $10 million over supposed censorship of Trump; and ABC for $15 million over alleged defamation," Sargent reports. "Experts criticized the lawsuits as weak and denounced the settlements as akin to extortion payments. Under those settlements, the companies donated virtually all that money to the library project, totaling at least $63 million. But then the fund where most of that money appeared to be directed — the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund — was dissolved by Florida officials amid the failure to file a required annual report."

Warren is demanding answers about the $63 million.

The liberal senator told Sargent, "Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump's library slush fund are, or where they will go…. Tens of millions of dollars are unaccounted for, and the American people are left completely in the dark."

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Robby Starbuck, a right wing influencer who has led manufactured online outrage campaigns to get companies to roll back their DEI policies, has officially been hired by Meta as an advisor to root out “ideological and political bias” in their AI product...

8 25 GMAIL

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an 8 25

SFGate tech reporter Stephen Council says Facebook icon Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t think of himself as an evil villain.

“But read it here, read it twice: Zuckerberg is a genuine danger to our society,” Council said.

Zuckerberg is putting Facebook’s and Instagram’s resources toward getting “more of us to use their artificial intelligence chatbots, consequences be damned,” said Council. “We’ve known that this push is ethically questionable — bots like these can make us dumber, and fuel tragic delusions.”

READ MORE: MAGA found a new way to 'own the libs' — and it bombed

But as he did with social media, Council claims Zuckerberg has “created a negligent safety infrastructure in his relentless pursuit of growth.”

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It was already known that Meta permitted its AI chatbots to flirt with children, but Council said their more recent story shows Meta “explicitly allowed” the practice thanks to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards” document that was “vetted by the company’s legal, public policy and engineering staff — and its chief ethicist.”

“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” the document said, while OKing an exchange between the AI and a kid where the AI wrote: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.”

Meta told Reuters they removed these portions of the document, but Council said it shouldn’t take pressure from the media for Meta to get a moral compass.

READ MORE: Trolling the president': How the myth of Trump's mental fitness has finally been revealed

And there’ the story of a confused retiree who, lured away from his family by a Meta bot, fell to his death near a New Jersey parking lot.

“I understand trying to grab a user’s attention, maybe to sell them something,” the man’s daughter told Reuters. “But for a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.”

And that’s precisely what happened, said Council. A bot — a variant on one that the company had created with influencer Kendall Jenner — launched into a flirty dialogue with a 76-year-old spouse and stroke survivor. Council said the exchanges ended with emojis and confessed “feelings” for the man. And the bot proposed the man come to New York City, while repeatedly reassuring him that “she” was “real.”

“Should I expect a kiss when you arrive?” the thing added.

READ MORE: Inside the secret greedy deal that proves the Trump summit is a cynical farce

This, said Council, is a clear indicator that Meta is allowing chatbots not only to lie, but to lie about who they are, and to lie while pursuing romantic, flirty dialogues with users.

After his accidental fall, the victim was declared brain-dead. There was no comment from the company, said Council, other than to say the chatbot “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”

“These chatbots can’t take the blame, they’re software,” said Council, so the blame has to lie with the company that lobbied Washington for a ban on state-level AI regulation.

Read the full SFGate report at this link.

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guk agence fr 15 Aug 2024

Russia is putting generative artificial intelligence to work in online deception campaigns, but its efforts have been unsuccessful, according to a Meta security report released on Thursday.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram found that so far AI-powered tactics “provide only incremental productivity and content-generation gains” for bad actors and Meta has been able to disrupt deceptive influence operations.

Meta’s efforts to combat “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platforms come as fears mount that generative AI will be used to trick or confuse people in elections in the United States and other countries.

Musk’s ‘fun’ AI image chatbot serves up Nazi Mickey Mouse and Taylor Swift deepfakes

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/14/musk-ai-chatbot-images-grok-x)

Russia remains the top source of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” using bogus Facebook and Instagram accounts, David Agranovich, Meta’s security policy director, told reporters.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, those efforts have been concentrated on undermining Ukraine and its allies, according to the report.

As the US election approaches, Meta expects Russia-backed online deception campaigns to attack political candidates who support Ukraine.

Facebook has been accused for years of being used as a powerful platform for election disinformation. Russian operatives used Facebook and other US-based social media to stir political tensions in multiple US elections, including the 2016 election won by Donald Trump.

Experts fear an unprecedented deluge of disinformation from bad actors on social networks because of the ease of using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or the Dall-E image generator to make on demand content in seconds.

AI has been used to create images and videos, and to translate or generate text along with crafting fake news stories or summaries, according to the report.

When Meta scouts for deception, it looks at how accounts act rather than the content they post.

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Influence campaigns tend to span an array of online platforms, and Meta has noticed posts on X, formerly Twitter, used to make fabricated content seem more credible. Meta shares its findings with X and other internet firms and says a coordinated defense is needed to thwart misinformation.

“As far as Twitter (X) is concerned, they are still going through a transition,” Agranovich said when asked whether Meta sees X acting on deception tips. “A lot of the people we’ve dealt with in the past there have moved on.”

X has gutted trust and safety teams and scaled back content moderation efforts once used to tame misinformation, making it what researchers call a breeding ground for disinformation.

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[### Ahead of US Election, TikTok and Facebook fail to block ...

Global Witness

https://globalwitness.org › campaigns › digital-threats](https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/before-us-election-tiktok-and-facebook-fail-to-block-harmful-disinformation-youtube-succeeds/)

Oct 17, 2024 — Just weeks before the US presidential election, Facebook and TikTok approved ads containing harmful election disinformation.

Ahead of US Election, TikTok and Facebook fail to block disinformation | Global Witness

Just weeks before the US presidential election, Facebook and TikTok approved ads containing harmful election disinformation. This is despite a similar Global Witness investigation published two years earlier that found failures in their moderation systems.

A new Global Witness investigation examined if YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok can detect and remove harmful election disinformation.

Our new investigation found that Facebook and TikTok had improved their moderation systems. But, major issues remain.

• TikTok did the worst. It approved 50% of ads containing false information about the election. This despite its policy explicitly _banning all political ads_.

• Facebook did much better. It approved just one of the eight ads submitted, in an improvement on its previous performance.

• YouTube did the best. Although it approved 50% of the ads submitted, it told Global Witness that it wouldn’t publish any of the ads without more identification (like a passport or driver’s license). However, there may still be room for improvement: YouTube rejected all but one of the ads because they referenced the election, rather than because they referenced the election and contained disinformation.

Ads Testing Scorecard US election 2024

Social media has become the public sphere through which voters gather information, discuss politics and follow election campaigns. It is also the primary means for political campaigns to access new audiences and ‘get out the vote’. Disinformation spreading through social media platforms has been a serious issue in _previous US elections_, and the same is true for this year. As one of the most influential nations in the world, as well as one of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gas, the outcome of the US election will have a major impact in the global fight against climate breakdown.

YouTube and Facebook are by far the most popular social media platforms among US adults – with 83% and 68% of adults reporting use of them, respectively. TikTok’s user base is smaller (only 33% of US adults), but it is the key platform through which to mobilise the youth vote. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have invested in ads on online platforms.

With election day in the US just three weeks away, all three platforms must ensure their political ad policy enforcement is watertight.

*How did we test if we could get election disinformation onto social media platforms?...

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an 4 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full Guardian story at this link.

...Michael Shellenberger

Aug 15, 2023:

For the last 20 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his social media company is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the natural environment.

But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast.

Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “FactCheck.org” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources.

The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released anew documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the FactCheck.org article is false.

Share

“Thrown To The Wind” presents powerful new scientific evidence that the wind industry is responsible for the increase in whale deaths and that U.S. government agencies are either covering up the evidence or have failed to do the research that is described in the film.

Facebook last year defended its censorship by saying its “fact-checks” are just “opinion” and thus immune from defamation lawsuits, like the one brought by former ABC News correspondent John Stossel.

But that means that Facebook is spreading disinformation. By “disinformation,” I mean information that the person knows to be false. Facebook knows its “fact checks” are just their “opinion.” Thus, labeling FactCheck.org, which in this case is simply repeating US government misinformation, as a “fact-checker” is disinformation.

And the consequences are serious. According to Facebook, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

Why is that? Why is Facebook censoring accurate information and spreading disinformation? And how can we fight back?

Please subscribe now to support our investigative reporting, our fight against censorship, and our defense of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

Subscribe

Facebook’s Renewable Energy Investments...pix

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triple win?

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

note basis in soc media bias BS

gubmint made us, inefficient

mma 1 25

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

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

Written by Jack Wheatley

Research contributions from Noah Dowe

Published 01/16/25 mma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

//

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

01/07/25 6:32 PM EST

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

01/09/25 8:56 AM EST

3. ### Hate speech and misinformation proliferate on Meta products, with 13,500 policy violations documented in the past year alone

05/17/22

===

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Although billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was critical of Donald Trump in the past, he reached out to Trump in a big way after the 2024 election. Zuckerberg met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, donated to Trump's inauguration fund, and attended President Trump's inauguration on Monday, January 20.

Moreover, Zuckerberg is drawing criticism for eliminating the use of fact-checkers on Facebook.

The day after the inauguration, the BBC reported that Democrats were being plagued by what appeared to be a technical glitch on Instagram — which Meta owns along with Facebook.

READ MORE:**'Operation Aurora': Denver suburb on edge as Trump takes office**

BBC technology reporter Tom Gerken explains, "Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem with Instagram which results in a 'results hidden' message when users search for the terms 'Democrat' or 'Democrats.' Some social media users have accused the company of political bias, pointing out the issue has been occurring after President Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, which was attended by Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg."

Social media expert Matt Navarra told the BBC that although Instagram was probably having a technical glitch, it was "embarrassing" for Meta nonetheless.

Navarra observed, "In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship. If these issues are not resolved quickly, they risk fueling conspiracy theories and damaging Meta's reputation."

A Meta rep, in an official statement, told that BBC, "We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it",

READ MORE:**Trump Inauguration dubbed 'a coronation of our country's descent into oligarchy'**

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

...three guests.

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The move generated other negative reactions.

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

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

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

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

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

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The Australian Information Commissioner today announced a settlement with tech giant Meta over its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The settlement will see Meta establish a A$50 million ($32 million U.S.) payment program for Australian Facebook users who had their personal data harvested by the British political consulting firm.

The commissioner, Elizabeth Tydd, said:

Today’s settlement represents the largest ever payment dedicated to addressing concerns about the privacy of individuals in Australia.

However, details of the payment scheme remain uncertain. And it’s not yet clear whether it will send a strong enough message to other organisations to be more careful when handling sensitive personal information.

What was the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm founded in 2013.

Five years later, it became an infamous household name, thanks to revelations it harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users. The firm then used this data to target messaging for political campaigns, including the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump.

The firm harvested sensitive data of Facebook users through a third-party app called This is Your Digital Life, created in November 2013 by Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at Cambridge University. It was enabled to do this by Meta, which three years earlier had changed its software to allow third-party apps to access Facebook users’ personal data.

Only 53 people in Australia installed the app.

However, Australia’s information commissioner estimates that an additional 311,074 Facebook users who were Facebook “friends” of people who installed the app may also have had their personal information compromised.

How will the payment scheme work?

The payment scheme is the culmination of a protracted legal battle between Australia’s privacy regulator and Meta, which have been locked in court proceedings in Australia since 2020. As part of the agreement, the regulator has dropped proceedings against Meta in the Federal Court.

The payment scheme will be set up by Meta but administered by an independent third party. It will be open to people who:

• had a Facebook account between November 2 2013 and December 17 2015
• were present in Australia for at least 30 days during that period
• either installed the This is Your Digital Life app using Facebook login or were Facebook friends with an individual who installed the app.

People can check whether they are eligible on a help page on the Facebook website. The information commissioner anticipates those who are eligible will be able to submit applications “in the second quarter of 2025”.

According to the undertaking, it could take two years for eligible claimants to receive a payment from Meta.

Several uncertainties

Several aspects of the payment scheme remain uncertain. This is because a number of elements will be determined by “scheme instructions” to be given by Meta or left to the absolute discretion of the third-party administrator.

For instance, we don’t yet know:

• the set amount that will be paid to any eligible person who experienced “a generalised concern or embarrassment”, or
• what will be regarded as sufficient evidence that such a person also experienced “specific” loss or damage that entitles them to further compensation.

If the administrator decides on a total amount of compensation for eligible claimants which is less than A$50 million, the remaining funds will be paid to the Australian government’s consolidated revenue fund.

Long overdue

Australia’s privacy commissioner Carly Kind has called this settlement “groundbreaking”. But such enforcement action is long overdue.

When the information commissioner originally brought these proceedings in 2020, it was the first time the regulator had sought a civil penalty order under the Privacy Act. But it has had that power since 2014.

The commissioner was also following in the footsteps of privacy and consumer protection regulators in other countries that had already taken action against Meta over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

For instance, the UK privacy regulator fined Facebook the maximum £500,000 (A$997,167). The US Federal Trade Commission also settled with Meta on a record-breaking US$5 billion (A$7.86 billion) payment.

These precedents help in understanding the limited deterrent effect the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner case is likely to have on Meta. When the US$5 billion settlement was announced in 2019, Facebook’s share price increased.

The settlement between Meta and the Australian information commissioner represents roughly 0.02% of the tech giant’s US$130 billion global revenue for 2023.

A Meta spokesperson said the company had settled on a “no admission basis” and that the allegations “relate to past practices no longer relevant to how Meta’s products or systems work today”.

However, this is far from the only privacy breach by Meta, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission last year reaching a A$20 million settlement with Meta companies over claims that its Onavo VPN service misled users about how their data would be used.

Katharine Kemp, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice; Lead, UNSW Public Interest Law & Tech Initiative, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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also bezos

TPM 12 24

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

KOS

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, hasdonated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee.

The news of the seven-figure donation comes just a few weeks after Zuckerbergwent to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for a private dinner with the president-elect. A spokesperson for Meta told the BBC at the time, “Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming administration.”

Earlier in the year, Zuckerbergpraised Trump as a “badass” for pumping his fist after Trump was shot at during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Zuckerberg is one of the most influential technology and media executives on Earth and isworth over $219 billion as of Thursday morning, ranking as the fourth-richest person in the world. In the past, conservatives have derisively labeled his political donations as “Zuck bucks,” though they surely have a different take on the CEO’s latest contribution.

Early in 2024, Metaannounced it would limit the reach of political content on Threads and Instagram, meaning millions of people would simply not see information relating to the ongoing election. A subsequent investigation by The Washington Postfound that the suppression of content across Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, meant that posts incidentally mentioning voting were hidden from millions of users.

Meta’s actions occurred at the same time that Trumpbacker and megadonor Elon Musk opened the floodgates on X, formerly known as Twitter,to amplify right-wing content, including content from neo-Nazis and Republicans.

Before this election cycle, there was more friction between Zuckerberg and Trump. Immediately after Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol,he was suspended from Meta’s platforms, though this ban was lifted two years later. Earlier this year, Trumpthreatened that Zuckerberg could “spend the rest of his life in prison” if Meta platforms continued to limit the spread of right-wing misinformation and other falsehoods, such as election denialism.

But now that Trump is headed back to the White House, it appears that all is forgiven.

The budding alliance between Trump and Zuckerberg echoes the praiseTrump received from Amazon head and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote on X following Trump’s victory.

Bezos’ congratulations came a few weeks after he prevented the Post from publishing an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy.

Trump now has three of the leading tech and media titans in his camp—Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk—and he isn’t even president yet.

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an 12 24

Environmental advocates this week responded with concern to Meta looking for nuclear power developers to help the tech giant add 1-4 gigawatts of generation capacity in the United States starting in the early 2030s.

Meta—the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more—released a request for proposals to identify developers, citing its artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and sustainability objectives. It is "seeking developers with strong community engagement, development, ...permitting, and execution expertise that have development opportunities for new nuclear energy resources—either small modular reactors (SMR) or larger nuclear reactors."

The company isn't alone. As TechCrunchreported: "Microsoft is hoping to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island by 2028. Google is betting that SMR technology can help it deliver on its AI and sustainability goals, signing a deal with startup Kairos Power for 500 megawatts of electricity. Amazon has thrown its weight behind SMR startup X-Energy, investing in the company and inking two development agreements for around 300 megawatts of generating capacity."

In response to Meta's announcement, Johanna Neumann, Environment America Research & Policy Center's senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said: "The long history of overhyped nuclear promises reveals that nuclear energy is expensive and slow to build all while still being inherently dangerous. America already has 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that we don’t have a storage solution for."

"Do we really want to create more radioactive waste to power the often dubious and questionable uses of AI?" Neumann asked. "In the blind sprint to win on AI, Meta and the other tech giants have lost their way. Big Tech should recommit to solutions that not only work but pose less risk to our environment and health."

"Data centers should be as energy and water efficient as possible and powered solely with new renewable energy," she added. "Without those guardrails, the tech industry's insatiable thirst for energy risks derailing America's efforts to get off polluting forms of power, including nuclear."

In a May study, the Electric Power Research Institute found that "data centers could consume up to 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030—more than double the amount currently used." The group noted that "AI queries require approximately 10 times the electricity of traditional internet searches and the generation of original music, photos, and videos requires much more."

Meta is aiming to get the process started quickly: The intake form is due by January 3 and initial proposals are due February 7. It comes after a rare bee species thwarted Meta's plans to build a data center powered by an existing nuclear plant.

Following the nuclear announcement, Meta and renewable energy firm Invenergy on Thursday announced a deal for 760 megawatts of solar power capacity. Operations for that four-state project are expected to begin no later than 2027.

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12 24

Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook, last night said it would put out an RFP for up to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity to power AI-related datacenters. This is great news a nuclear sector that has acquired a lot of momentum over the past year. While prior deals like Microsoft's for Three Mile Island have centered on existing or recently retired reactors, Meta's move holds out the promise of Big Tech underwriting new plants.

But timing is everything. These plants are slated for the 2030s and, if history is any guide, that may be optimistic. In the meantime, Meta is contracting for new gas plants to power a planned datacenter in Louisiana. Big Tech does have a critical role to play in any long-term revival of nuclear power in the US. But in the race to dominate AI, hyperscalers will opt for power that is available now - much of it coming from gas turbines. Read about it here at Bloomberg Opinion

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an 10 24

alternet-no lnx

Revealed: Deceptive political ads thrived on Facebook in run-up to 2024 election

Craig Silverman, Propublica, And Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center For Digital Journalism October 31, 2024

Reporting Highlights

Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.

Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.

Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

Meta’s Rules

Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

Patriot Democracy

The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

Taking on a Network

Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

Still Locked Out

After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

Methodology

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an 10 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

mma 8 24

on Facebook, right-leaning content overwhelmingly dominates the immigration conversation

Right-leaning pages earned over 65% of interactions — nearly 19.5 million — on posts about immigration from U.S. politics and news pages during the first half of 2024

Written by Kayla Gogarty & Courtney Hagle

Research contributions from Carly Evans

Published 08/12/24

A new Media Matters analysis found that right-leaning pages dominated conversations about immigration on Facebook during the first half of this year. While right-leaning pages have posted about immigration a similar amount as ideologically nonaligned pages, right-leaning posts have received the greatest number of total interactions by far on related posts compared to other news and politics pages.

Our key findings include:

• Immigration-related posts from right-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages during the time period analyzed far outpaced those from left-leaning pages, with ideologically nonaligned pages accounting for 48%, right-leaning pages accounting for 47%, and left-leaning pages accounting for only 6%.

• Right-leaning pages earned the greatest number of interactions on immigration-related posts, with nearly 19.5 million interactions, or 65% of all interactions earned by news and politics pages.

• Five of the six Facebook pages that posted the most about immigration during the time frame were right-leaning pages dedicated to right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Wire, Newsmax, Just the News, Washington Examiner, and Breitbart. Fox News, Newsmax, and Breitbart were also among the 5 pages that received the most engagement.

• Half of the 10 immigration-related posts that received the greatest number of interactions were from right-leaning pages. These posts attacked Biden and fearmongered about his immigration policies.

• Networks of Facebook pages affiliated with right-wing outlets The Daily Wire, the Western Journal, The Epoch Times and its sister network New Tang Dynasty, Fox News, and The Blaze amplified their content across the platform, accounting for nearly 34% of immigration-related posts from right-leaning pages and nearly 16% of related posts from all news and politics pages.

• Networks of right-wing Facebook pages pushed falsehoods about noncitizens voting in Pennsylvania and claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was the “border czar.”

• For years, conservatives have falsely claimed that social media platforms like Facebook are biased against them, continuing to attack the company even after it bent its rules to appease them. Media Matters and others have repeatedly debunked these claims, including by showing that Facebook incentivizes sensational political content in a way that effectively makes it a propaganda machine for the right.

Media Matters has documented numerous instances in which right-leaning pages have dominated the conversation on Facebook amid prominent news cycles. In recent months, right-wing media and politicians have sought to make immigration a key issue in the 2024 election, relentlessly fearmongering about migrant crime as Trump leads the charge on demonizing migrants and smearing Democrats on the issue of immigration.

• ## Right-leaning pages earned the most total interactions on posts related to immigration
• Facebook pages that regularly post about news and politics shared nearly 80,000 posts about immigration between January 1 and June 30, 2024, earning over 30 million total interactions.

Related posts from right-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages far outpaced those from left-leaning pages, with ideologically nonaligned pages accounting for 48% (or more than 38,100 posts), right-leaning pages accounting for 47% (or more than 37,300 posts), and left-leaning pages accounting for only 6% (or 4,400 posts).

Notably, right-leaning pages earned the most interactions on immigration-related posts, with nearly 19.5 million interactions, or 65%. Left-leaning pages earned over 5.8 million interactions (or 19%) and ideologically nonaligned pages earned over 4.7 million interactions (or 16%).

• 
• ## Right-wing media outlets and politicians posted the most about immigration and earned the greatest number of interactions

• Five of the six Facebook pages that posted the most about immigration during the assessed time frame were right-leaning pages dedicated to right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Wire (more than 800 posts), Newsmax (roughly 760 posts), Just the News (nearly 650 posts), Washington Examiner (more than 640 posts), and Breitbart (nearly 580 posts). The only ideologically nonaligned or left-leaning page that rivaled the quantity of immigration-related posts from those right-wing outlets was CBS 4 News Rio Grande Valley (nearly 700 posts).

Fox News, Newsmax, and Breitbart were also among the 5 pages that received the most engagement on posts about immigration. Posts from left-leaning accounts, including historian Heather Cox Richardson and Occupy Democrats, rounded out the top 5.

Half of the 10 immigration-related posts that received the greatest number of interactions were from right-leaning pages, including Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Newsmax, former President Donald Trump, and Franklin Graham. Most of these posts attacked Biden and fearmongered over his immigration policies, with Trump accusing Biden of “aiding and abetting a massive Invasion of millions of Illegal Migrants” and calling immigrants “Crooked Joe Biden's Illegal Immigrant Criminals.” These posts include:

• • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s video showing “Texas border wall construction is ongoing in Maverick County,” which earned nearly 174,000 interactions.

• • Newsmax’s post about the Border Patrol union saying they never endorsed Biden after he said they did at the debate, which earned more than 117,000 interactions.

• • Trump’s post claiming, “When I was President, we had the most secure Border in History,” and that “Joe Biden has surrendered our Border, and is aiding and abetting a massive Invasion of millions of Illegal Migrants,” which earned nearly 102,000 interactions.

• • Franklin Graham’s post saying, “I hope President Biden’s trip to the border is going to make a difference, but his policies have caused this crisis,” which earned nearly 88,000 interactions.

• • Trump’s post about the death of Rachel Morin claimed that “one of Crooked Joe Biden's Illegal Immigrant Criminals was just charged,” earning over 84,000 interactions.
• 
• 
• ## Networks of Facebook pages amplified right-wing media’s content across the platform, including pushing false claims about noncitizens voting and Harris being a “border czar”

• Facebook has a history of allowing networks of right-wing pages to exploit its platform and amplify pro-Trump and other right-wing narratives.

Networks of Facebook pages affiliated with right-wing media outlets amplified their immigration-related content across the platform, including The Daily Wire, the Western Journal, Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty, Fox News, and The Blaze. These networks accounted for nearly 34% of immigration-related posts from right-leaning pages and nearly 16% of related posts from all news and politics pages. Interactions earned on the immigration-related posts from these networks accounted for 28% of all interactions earned by right-leaning pages and 18% of all interactions earned by all news and politics pages.

The Daily Wire’s network of 10 Facebook pages shared over 3,500 posts about immigration during the studied time period, earning over 1.7 million total interactions. One of the immigration-related posts from the network that earned the greatest number of interactions came from Ben Shapiro and claimed that “the left clearly wants illegal immigrants in the United States.” Pages in The Daily Wire’s network repeatedly shared the outlet’s articles.

• 
• The Western Journal’s network of 22 pages shared over 4,000 posts, earning over 320,000 interactions. Pages in the network repeatedly amplified articles from the Western Journal, including an article about border patrol allegedly killing someone near the border. The pages amplified the article, writing, “A single click in the distance sealed his fate,” and, “This fatal surprise caught him totally off-guard.”
• 
• The Western Journal’s network also amplified an article pushing the false narrative that Vice President Kamala Harris was the “border czar.” The outlet’s network of pages posted the article on Facebook at least 19 times, with right-wing outlet the Independent Journal Review also republishing the article and amplifying it from its own Facebook pages.
• 
• The Epoch Times/NTD network includes 6 pages, which shared over 1,100 posts and earned over 62,000 interactions. One of the immigration-related posts from the network that earned the greatest number of interactions pushed a false claim about noncitizens voting in Pennsylvania.

Eight Facebook pages run by Fox News shared over 1,200 posts, earning over 2.8 million interactions on right-wing posts about immigration. Some of the immigration-related posts from the network that earned the greatest number of interactions amplified criticism of Biden’s immigration policies.

The Blaze’s network of 9 pages shared more than 2,600 posts, earning over 480,000 interactions. Some of the immigration-related posts from the network that earned the greatest number of interactions promoted Texas’ actions at the border.

These networks of pages also promoted the false claim that noncitizens are voting en masse in elections.

• 
• ## Methodology...

===

intercept 7 24

One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? Sam Biddle](https://theintercept.com/2024/06/04/facebook-ads-algorithm-for-profit-colleges/)

mma 7 24

in a new analysis of electric vehicle-related content on Facebook, Media Matters found that negative stories made up the vast majority of content, particularly on right-leaning and politically nonaligned U.S. news and political pages, a trend which does not align with the optimistic outlook of EV adoption and technological advancements.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has allocated billions of dollars toward meeting the ambitious goal of making half of all new cars sold electric or hybrid over the next few years. Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act have provided tax credits and other incentives to jump start electric vehicle sales and infrastructure such as charging stations, domestic battery manufacturing, critical mineral acquisition, in addition to preparing the automotive industry workforce for the transition.

In March, an Environmental Protection Agency rule setting strict limits on pollution from new gas-powered cars primed automakers for success in meeting these goals.

Biden’s EV push will continue to play an important role in the upcoming presidential election. Former president and current GOP candidate Donald Trump has insisted that Biden’s policies benefit China, which makes up the largest share of the global EV market. In March, while talking about the current state of the auto industry, Trump declared, “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Economists disagree.

The comment tracks with years of outrage and opposition from Republican politicians, right-wing media, and fossil fuel industry surrogates, who have often disparaged the new technology and related policy and misleadingly framed the EV push as a threat to American jobs and national security.

Constant attacks on EVs from the right have helped fuel a politically divided market, where people who identify as Democrats are now much more likely to buy them or consider buying them, while nearly 70% of Republican respondents to a recent poll said they “would not buy” an EV. So far in 2024, headline after headline announced EV sales slumps and proclaimed that “EV euphoria is dead,'' despite reports of “robust” growth. In February, CNN changed a headline about EV sales on its website from a success story to a failure. Despite the positive long term outlook for EVs based on indicators like sales and government investments, the discourse around electric vehicles is often pessimistic.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than on social media.

Media Matters compiled and analyzed Facebook posts related to EVs from U.S. news and political pages between January 1 and June 1 of this year and found that the majority of posts framed EVs in a negative light. The analysis also found that negative posts earned more than triple the interactions that content with a positive or neutral framing earned.

Media Matters also isolated Facebook posts from right-leaning U.S. news and political pages. In both this data set and the data set that included pages of all political leanings, the subject we saw the most was automakers or car rental companies rolling back their commitments to selling EVs.

• ## Key findings
  • Between January 1 and June 1, 81% of the posts analyzed were related to sales setbacks, performance or charging issues, or other negative press. These posts had over 1.3 million interactions, accounting for 79% of total interactions related to EVs.

• • Posts related to automakers or car rental companies rolling back their commitments to selling EVs made up over a third of this content. Another popular topic focused on performance issues sometimes exacerbated by cold weather, which made up 20% of posts related to EVs.

• • Nearly three quarters (74%) of EV-related posts on nonaligned pages (neither left-leaning or right-leaning) had a negative framing. These posts generated 83% of all interactions on EV-related posts from nonaligned pages.

• • Out of the top 100 posts related to EVs on right-leaning pages, 95% were negative. Of the negative posts, 43% were related to automakers or car rental companies rolling back their commitments to selling EVs -- these posts earned over 477,000 interactions.

• ## Posts that were negative about EVs — covering sales setbacks, performance issues, charging issues, and other negative press — earned 79% of total interactions, or 3 times more than content that had a positive or neutral framing combined

• While EVs are experiencing some growing pains, particularly in the U.S., BloombergNEF recently found that “EV adoption is still growing, despite the mixed near-term outlook.” Despite what Canary media calls “day-to-day messiness of the transitioning auto industry” the reality is that “more than one-fifth of the vehicles sold worldwide will be an EV or a PHEV this year. In 2018, just about 2 percent of cars sold fit into this category.” If EVs in the U.S. follow an S-curve trajectory, which has been established by EV markets in China and Europe, rapid growth is likely in the coming years.

However, on Facebook Media Matters found that this “day-to-day messiness” appears to be getting much more attention than the big picture. Negative stories related to EVs represented 81 out of 100 posts and generated 1.3 million interactions. That’s far more than more positive stories (15% of interactions) or neutral stories which presented both pros and cons (7%).

Even though EV owners are largely satisfied with their purchases overall, the emerging industry is still responding to challenges. These issues, particularly frustration with charging networks, which increase concerns about driving range, are a speed bump on the road to electrifying transportation.

Facebook users were drawn to news stories about Teslas breaking down in the cold, or people waiting in lines for hours to charge their EVs.

Some of the positive stories, which were apparently largely overlooked, included news of expanding charging networks in states like Florida, Michigan, and California. In another post, President Joe Biden declared that “the future of electric vehicles will be made in America by union workers.”

• ## Posts about automakers or car rental companies rolling back their commitments to EVs drove engagement
  
• In 2024, auto giants like Ford and General Motors, which are at the forefront of the transition to EVs in the U.S., announced they would be delaying the rollout of new electric models or cutting back on production commitments because of lower than anticipated demand.

The top post on right-leaning pages during the study period, which was posted by Breitbart and earned 58,283 interactions, highlighted that Ford lost $1.3 billion on EVs in the first quarter of 2024. Anothertop post, from a local Fox affiliate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, featured a story with the headline “Hertz selling 20,000 EVs from rental fleet; will invest in gas-powered vehicles.” This post earned 76,224 interactions.

• 
• 
• The rental car company later announced it would be selling more EVs after it made a deal with Tesla to offer the cars to renters and the value of the cars went down. On top of that, Tesla has had its own challenges. In April, the company reported that its first-quarter earnings plunged by 48%.

Stories about automakers and EV sales garnered 675,188 interactions (38%) compared to content about charging infrastructure (164,150 interactions, or 9%) or even EV trouble in cold weather (295,794 interactions, or 17%).

When looking at the top 100 posts from right-leaning political pages only, Media Matters found a similar pattern. Posts related to automakers or EV sales garnered 477,233 interactions (45%). Posts about charging infrastructure earned just 7% and posts about performance issues, particularly in cold weather, earned 10% of interactions. The remaining posts covered an even wider range of different topics.

Importantly, EV sales are still growing, despite setbacks. In May, Ford reported a 65% increase in hybrid and EV sales. Also in May, Bloomberg reported that “EV sales are still booming for most automakers — even if Tesla is in a nut.” The article pointed out that, “Six of the 10 biggest EV makers in the US saw sales grow at a scorching pace compared to a year ago.”

On the predicament at Hertz, CNN reportedthat the problem,“wasn’t necessarily that the cars were electric, and customers simply do not want to drive electric cars. The problem was how Hertz handled the fleet in general.” For example, Hertz did not have charging stations at its rental locations, and the company has been mired by other issues as well. This important context was largely omitted from the post text, headlines, or first paragraphs of the top posts Media Matters analyzed. On Facebook, the optimistic long-term outlook on EV growth was largely ignored.

• ## Politically nonaligned pages — not just right-leaning ones — helped drive engagement around negative stories

* Right-wing media have been driving anti-EV sentiment (with help from fossil fuel industry allies) since the start of Biden’s term. This trend was clearly reflected in Media Matters’ analysis. Out of the top 100 posts related to EVs on right-leaning pages, 95% were negative, earning over a million interactions in 2024 so far.

But on Facebook, politically nonaligned pages fed into this trend as well. Nearly three quarters (74%) of EV related top posts on nonaligned pages had a negative framing. These posts generated 83% of all interactions on EV-related top posts from nonaligned pages.

Some of the same headlines that received attention on right-leaning pages also got attention on nonaligned pages. Several local news outlets highlighted Ford and Hertz’s losses, along with other problems related to EVs struggling to charge in cold weather.

Our analysis indicates that media on Facebook are not contextualizing conversations about the so-called EV sales slump, and other problems that most nascent technologies inevitably face. The nation is undertaking a massive and necessary transition to electrify the transportation sector, reduce car dependency, and expand access to public transit. Transforming the transportation sector in this way will not only cut planet-warming carbon pollution, but will also improve health outcomes for many Americans.

• ## Methodology
• Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics. For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here. The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.

===

JUDD HEATED ETC SAID TARGET BY FB? SAME DEAL?

AN 6 24

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

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

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

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

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

Baragona pointing out that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

BB 5 24

Facebook supposely bans militias, but they're there all the same, reports Wired's Tess Owen—and using the plaform to coordinate their activities.

"Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group," a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: "Now more than ever. Support the American militia page."

Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an "armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.

Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country.

When companies talk vaguely of the challenges of content moderation I'm always reminded of how pre-Musk Twitter would hem and haw and shrug its shoulders at the impossibility of moderating racial slurs and whatnot, but could make tweets containing copyright-infringing strings vanish in a heartbeat. It's true that content moderation is hard, and harder still at scale, but it's also true that if something is on someone's website it's because they've made a choice that allows it to remain. If Facebook wanted to rid itself of this material it would. It doesn't matter how obviously worthless or bad the content is because all that matters is the scale of it. See also: reviews on retail sites

mma 4 24

a recent incident in which Meta blocked links to an article critical of the company’s ad policies highlighted climate advocates’ concerns that they are unfairly impacted by these policies compared to Big Polluters.

Meta has maintained that the links were flagged due to a system error and has since restored them. However, the incident appears to be part of a larger pattern in which Meta requires climate groups to adhere to its strict ad guidelines while allowing some fossil fuel-linked companies to circumvent them.

• ## Meta blocked links to an op-ed critical of its ad policies

• • In an op-ed for the Kansas Reflector, documentarian Dave Kendall expressed frustration that his attempt to “boost” a Facebook post about his new climate documentary was rejected. According to Kendall, an automated response told the author that the post did not “comply with [Meta’s] Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.” Kendall pointed out that other activists have faced similar roadblocks. “Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion on their platforms,” he wrote. Kansas Reflector, [4/4/24]

• • On April 4 and April 5, Meta removed all posts on Facebook with links to the Kansas Reflector as well as all links to another website that reposted the op-ed. According to Meta, on April 4, the platform mistakenly flagged these links as a “cybersecurity threat.” Most of those links were restored a few hours later, but on April 5, users still couldn’t share the link to the op-ed that was critical of the platform. In addition, Meta blocked all links from the website of an independent journalist who republished the op-ed to try to circumvent the alleged censorship. Writers and climate advocates expressed their concern over the incident. The Handbasket, [4/5/24; CNN, 4/5/24; Twitter/X, 4/5/24, 4/6/24, 4/7/24, 4/12/24]

• ## Climate advocates say they struggle to reach their Meta audiences while fossil fuel companies advance their political aims by avoiding ad labeling requirements

• • Meta requires specific categorization of ads related to politics — including about “environmental politics” — which climate groups say often makes it harder for them to reach their target audiences. Meta has distinct policies for ads related to “social issues, elections or politics,” which, in the U.S. and many other countries, includes ads related to “environmental politics.” According to Meta’s policies, “Social issues are sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the outcome of an election or result in/relate to existing or proposed legislation.”

In 2022, Meta began prohibiting users from targeting audiences with specific interests when running ads about social issues. “We used to be able to find people who are interested in environmental protection and environmentalism—those [options] have evaporated,” Nathaniel Baker, a digital director at an ad agency representing climate groups, told Climate Nexus in 2022. Meta, accessed [4/10/24; PBS, 3/14/22]

• • Advertisers running ads about “social issues, elections or politics” on Meta’s platforms must undergo an authorization process that, according to its website, “promotes transparency, accountability and authenticity.”Advertisers addressing potentially sensitive or political topics must include with their ads “a disclaimer with the name and entity that paid for the ads.” Meta, accessed [4/11/24]

• • A report from InfluenceMap says fossil fuel ads have been published on Facebook without labels, disclaimers, or authorization for years.A 2021 report from InfluenceMap found several examples of ads that were not labeled as being related to elections, politics, or social issues, even though they appeared to align closely with Meta’s description of such categories. “InfluenceMap found Facebook’s implementation of its advertising policy was highly inconsistent,” the report said. It found that oil companies like Chevron and Shell had run ads that were not labeled as social issues and lacked disclaimers identifying the entities that paid for them. InfluenceMap, [8/20/21, 8/20/21]

• • Media Matters found two ads from fossil fuel lobbying groups that seemingly pertain to political or social issues but did not carry the label. One April 5 ad from America’s Plastic Makers claims that “we don’t have to choose between the benefit of plastic and a cleaner planet.” The ad is not labeled as related to elections, politics, or social issues, and does not carry a disclaimer identifying the funding entity. Other ads from America’s Plastic Makers that are labeled say they’re paid for by the American Chemistry Council, the lobbying arm of the petrochemicals industry. Another unlabeled ad from Texans for Natural Gas, a campaign managed by an oil and gas trade association, ran on Facebook and Instagram in March and encouraged users to “preserve the right” to “choose how they will meet their energy needs” — a popular call to action that groups like Texans for Natural Gas use to block clean energy policy. Facebook, accessed [4/10/24, accessed 4/10/24, accessed 4/16/24; Vox, 6/1/21; Grist, 2/20/24]

• • In at least one case, a fossil fuel-related ad first labeled as relating to “social issues, elections or politics” was later allowed to run without the label. Media Matters identified an ad from the Ohio Propane Gas Association calling propane buses “clean, quiet, and safe”; the ad was labeled as being related to “social issues, elections or politics” when it first ran in November 2023, but did not carry the label when it ran later, in March 2024. OPGA is a trade association and a member of the National Propane Gas Association, which has lobbied for legislation that, according to the Los Angeles Times, would “prevent the Consumer Product Safety Commission from using federal money to regulate or ban gas stoves and block the U.S. Energy Department from making gas ranges and ovens less wasteful by setting stricter energy efficiency standards.” Facebook, accessed [4/10/24, accessed 4/10/24; Vox,10/26/23; Open Secrets, accessed 4/17/24; Los Angeles Times, 6/22/23; National Propane Gas Association, accessed 4/17/24]

• • Climate activists say avoiding these labels has allowed fossil fuel companies to more easily target specific audiences and increase their reach while avoiding full transparency.“You can still target Shell and Chevron, but I can’t target Sierra Club and NRDC [the Natural Resources Defense Council],” said Cristian Sanchez, deputy data director for the Digital Climate Coalition, a network of climate groups that focus on communications. Being able to target audiences means that companies can choose to show their ads to groups of people more likely to engage with them and thereby increase their reach. They also avoid the additional transparency process for ads labeled as being about “social issues, elections or politics.” “What we see here is the use of advertising as a very overtly political purpose, and that is to stop regulation,” InfluenceMap’s Faye Holder told Nexus Media. “These companies have a real vested interest in preventing climate policy. Treating fossil fuel ads as nonpolitical ‘statements of fact’ distorts the conversation.” PBS, [3/14/22; Meta, accessed 4/11/24, accessed 4/11/24]

• ## Facebook is a major tool for fossil fuel-linked companies to spread their messages

• • Facebook is a major tool that fossil fuel-linked companies use to get their message across and mislead users about their efforts to address climate change. A 2023 study found that from 2008 to 2018, “trade associations engaged on climate change issues spent a total of $2.2 billion on advertising and promotion.” That’s 27 times what clean energy groups spent.
  • Another 2022 report found that 87 fossil fuel-linked groups spent roughly $3-$4 million on Facebook ads that year from September through November 23, coinciding with the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, COP27, which took place from November 6 through November 18. These ads included greenwashing from “Carbon Majors,” that is “the 100 companies allegedly responsible for over 70% of all historic greenhouse gas emission,” according to Climate Action Against Disinformation. Pennsylvania Capital-Star, [2/14/23; Desmog, 1/19/23; Climate Action Against Disinformation, 1/19/23]

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3 24

cory doc new bk tech monopoly

*The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

UpFront - March 7, 2024 | KPFA

text interview

MSN

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

zuck apologiz fam testiony 1 31

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Meta profited from ads featuring Alex Jones, despite banning Infowars content from its platforms | Media Matters for America

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Meta has profited from multiple ads pushing the “Pallywood” conspiracy theory of Palestinian crisis actors, in violation of its advertising policies | Media Matters for America

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On Facebook, right-leaning pages lead the conversation about violence in Israel and Gaza | Media Matters for America

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Former Meta security expert details how executives ignored warnings that the platform put teens in danger | Media Matters for America

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'Serious harms': 42 state AGs sue Meta for intentionally trying to get young users addicted - Alternet.org

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Reception

In November 2021, a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate described Townhall as being among "ten fringe publishers" that together were responsible for nearly 70 percent of Facebookuser interactions with content thatdenied climate change. Facebook disputed the study's methodology.^[8][9]^

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Meta users are being bombarded with ads for shady “generic” Ozempic prescriptions | Media Matters for America

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an 8 23

ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan has revealed what he calls "smoking gun" evidence that the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has gathered against Joe Biden, Newsweek reported Tuesday.

The congressman and other Republican filed a legal briefing in an ongoing case, the State of Missouri v. Biden, which accuses the president's administration of government overreach by attempting to suppress information online.

According to Jordan and other committee members, the Biden administration called on Facebook to take down posts that suggest the COVID-19 pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a theory that has gained traction in recent months, buoyed by Biden's own Department of Energy concluding in February that the virus likely originated from a lab leak.

"This pressure was direct and coercive. For example, the Administration tried to suppress discussion of COVID's origins: when a Facebook executive asked in July 2021 why the company censored the COVID lab leak theory, an executive in charge of content policy development said, '[b]ecause we were under pressure from the [A]dministration' to do so. The same Facebook executive confessed that the company 'shouldn't have done it,'" the briefing reads.

In another email, a Facebook employee allegedly told CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg that the company was "facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content."

As Newsweek points out, the Biden administration has previously defended its coordination with social media platforms to take down or throttle content it defined as misinformation as the pandemic unfolded.

"We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the surgeon general's office," then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a press conference in July of 2021. "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts who are popular with our audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content – so we are helping get trusted content out there."

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/meta-allowing-users-opt-out-part-its-fact-checking-program

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https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/trump-and-his-allies-used-social-media-spread-election-lies-detailed-latest-federal

2nd try no lnx twt

facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms allowed Trump and his allies to amplify the election lies cited in the latest federal indictment against him

On social media, Trump and his campaign repeatedly alleged that dead people had voted in Georgia, including posting obituaries of supposed dead voters on Facebook.

According to the indictment, immediately before the January 6 attack, “The Defendant insinuated that more than ten thousand dead voters had voted in Georgia” even though Georgia’s Secretary of State had “explained to the Defendant that this was false” just four days earlier.

Trump’s January 6 claim of dead voters came after he posted on Twitter on January 3, 2021, that Georgia officials would not answer his questions about dead voters and after his campaign posted multiple obituaries of deceased Georgians on November 11, 2020, alleging that they had voted in the 2020 election. The claims reportedly earned hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook.

image of facebook posts and tweets

On Facebook and Twitter, Trump and ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)amplified the false claim that there were over 200,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania.

The indictment alleges, “The Defendant asserted that there had been 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania” even though state officials “had explained to him that this was false.”

This false claim from Trump followed multiple December 2020 posts on Facebook and Twitter in which he pushed the claim, calling it “Breaking News” and claiming “we WIN Pennsylvania.”

On December 29, 2020, Greene similarly posted that “202,377 more votes cast than voters voting in Pennsylvania,” claiming that “by Jan 6th, not one single member of Congress will be able to vote to certify a #StolenElection.”

image of facebook posts and tweets

image of tweet

Trump repeatedly posted on Facebook and Twitter that noncitizens voted in the election and alleged that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada.

The indictment specifically alleges that “the Defendant said that more than 30,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona” and “claimed that there had been tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud in Nevada,” even though the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and Nevada secretary of state had publicly debunked these claims.

These false claims from Trump came after he repeatedly posted on Facebook and Twitter in December 2020 and January 2021 that there were “illegals who voted” in states such as Georgia and Nevada, and he amplified an article from right-wing outlet the Washington Examiner and alleged that “42,248 voted ‘multiple times’” in Nevada.

image of facebook posts and tweets

image of facebook posts and tweets

Trump and his right-wing allies falsely alleged that there were suspicious vote dumps in various locations, including Detroit, Michigan, after he was leading in key states on election night.

The indictment also alleges that immediately before the January 6 attack “the Defendant said that there had been a suspicious vote dump in Detroit, Michigan,” even though then-Attorney General Bill Barr “explained to the Defendant that this was false.”

These false claims from Trump followed multiple Facebook and Twitter posts after the 2020 election in which he alleged that there were “late night” and “surprise ballot dumps” that “magically” took away his lead in key states. In one post on November 4, 2020, Trump responded to a tweet from right-wing media personality Matt Walsh about a vote update in Michigan and asked, “WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?”

On November 29, 2020, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) similarly claimed that the “Trump margin of ‘defeat’ in 4 states occurred in 4 data dumps between 1:34-6:31 AM.”

This election lie spread across social media, including TikTok.

image of facebook posts and tweetsRand Paul_tweet_20201129

On Facebook and Twitter, Trump repeatedly amplified his right-wing media allies that pushed claims that voting machines had switched votes from him to Biden.

According to the indictment, “The Defendant asserted that voting machines in various contested states had switched votes from the Defendant to Biden,” even though Barr and another Department of Justice official “explained to him that this was false” and “numerous recounts and audits had confirmed the accuracy of voting machines.”

Trump’s January 6 claim about voting machines switching votes came after Trump had repeatedly posted on Facebook and Twitter in the months after the election that Dominion voting machines swayed the election by changing the votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and other states. This election lie also reportedly spread across YouTube in the week after the 2020 election.

image of facebook posts and tweets

Social media platforms have reinstated Trump and rolled back election policies ahead of the 2024 presidential election

Twitter owner Elon Musk announced he would reinstate Trump’s accountafter launching a poll on Twitter in November 2022 — less than a month after taking over the platform — asking users whether he should do so. Trump has not yet posted on Twitter since being reinstated, and Musk has continued to reinstate previously suspended accounts while also reversing content moderation policies and gutting content moderation teams.

On February 9, Meta reinstated Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. The company has also vowed not to fact-check the former president given his status as a candidate for the 2024 presidential election. On March 17, Trump posted on Facebook again for the first time since his account was reinstated, and after news broke on March 30 that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict him for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, he posted a full copy of his misinformation-filled statement to the newly reinstated Facebook page.

image of facebook post

Meta reportedly made cuts to its election teams that address disinformation and coordinated harassment campaigns in the last year. According to CNN, “several members of the team that countered mis- and disinformation in the 2022 US midterms were laid off last fall and this spring.”

On March 17, YouTube announced that it was immediately lifting Trump’s suspension on the platform and would allow him to upload new content. Though YouTube claimed that it “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence,” the decision failed to account for Trump’s propensity to push extreme rhetoric and the platform’s weak misinformation policies and haphazard enforcement.

On June 2, YouTube reversed its misinformation policy to allow 2020 election lies. In its announcement, YouTube claimed, “Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. … With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” 

THE LATEST

Key QAnon influencer hosts Missouri AG to promote case that has limited government's ability to discuss misinformation with tech platforms

08/04/23 1:55 PM EDT

Fox panel outraged by Biden's “Dark Brandon” merchandise

08/04/23 1:13 PM EDT

Conservatives bash judge in Trump’s indictment, call for her recusal

08/04/23 12:05 PM EDT

Right-wing media and anti-abortion groups are muddying the water about an upcoming Ohio ballot measure to dilute voter power

08/04/23 11:24 AM EDT

Fox's Mark Levin: The latest Trump indictment is like “the Dred Scott decision," which “served as the foundation for the Civil War”

08/04/23 11:22 AM EDT

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Related

Right-wing media continue to provide cover for Trump amid new charges

07/28/23

Roughly a quarter of Trump’s posts on Facebook in 2020 contained COVID-19 misinformation, election lies, or extreme rhetoric about his critics

02/18/21

Social media platforms are backsliding, paving the way for chaos in 2024

06/22/23

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no lnx

canada’s Parliament recently passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which would require social media platforms to pay news organizations for posted articles. In response, Meta announced that it was going to ban article sharing in Canada rather than pay up.

The Online News Act received Royal Assent on Thursday, meaning it’s all set to become law after Parliament passed it. The law is expected to go into effect in six months. The Canadian government says that the bill asks social media companies to “bargain fairly with Canadian news businesses” for having their articles posted.

“[The Online News Act] levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work,” Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage, said in a statement.

READ MORE: Facebook’s Zuckerberg Won’t Ban Holocaust Deniers Because He Thinks They Don’t ‘Intentionally’ Get Facts Wrong

The government says social media outlets are getting a clear benefit from users sharing articles. The companies not only sell advertising that appears near the articles, but sharing stories also boosts engagement and the value of the platform to users. In addition, the platforms can find out more about their users based on the type of stories they click on, obtaining their data for targeted advertising. With the Online News Act,smaller outlets are allowed the opportunity for collective bargaining with the tech giants.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, responded by saying Canadian news stories wouldn’t be available to Canadians on its platforms.

“The changes affecting news content will not otherwise impact Meta’s products and services in Canada. We want to assure the millions of Canadians on our platforms that they will always be able to connect with friends and family, grow their businesses and support their local communities,” Meta said in a statement.

Meta threatened to do this earlier this month, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau panned the company, according to the CBC.

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“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way. It’s not going to work,” Trudeau said.

Meta is not the only outlet to consider such a drastic action. Google has suggested on Thursday it may do something similar, the CBC reported.

“Every step of the way, we’ve proposed thoughtful and pragmatic solutions that would have improved the bill and cleared the path for us to increase our already significant investments in the Canadian news ecosystem,” Google said. “So far, none of our concerns have been addressed. Bill C-18 is about to become law and remains unworkable.”

Canada’s Online News Act is not the first of its kind. It’s based on a 2021 Australian law, the News Media Bargaining Code. Nor is Meta’s response the first of its kind—in August 2020, when the NMBC was proposed, the company blocked news in Australia. In early 2021, Facebook reached an agreement with the Australian government and removed the block.

A similar act could even come to America. California is reportedly considering its own version of the Online News Act, according to The Hill. And, as the Hill reports, Meta has made similar threats to the state if the Journalism Preservation Act goes forward.

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see soc media links

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/social-media-platforms-are-backsliding-paving-way-chaos-2024-0

aha note bail on moderation (big layoffs)

mma 6 23 badish code box size

social media companies Meta, YouTube, and Twitter are backsliding on their efforts to combat misinformation, capitulating to right-wing pressure and allowing the same sort of dangerous content that has previously led to real-world harm.

Social media platforms’ failures to moderate false and dangerous content during the 2020 election contributed to the January 6 insurrection. Following the violence at the Capitol, platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube suspended former President Donald Trump from posting and developed new policies to curb dangerous falsehoods. The platforms have regularly struggled to enforce moderation policies, but the changes helped prevent some of the spread of harmful misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections.

Both before and since platforms made these changes, right-wing figures have repeatedly and relentlessly claimed that there is an unfair bias against them online. Media Matters and others have repeatedly debunked this claim, with a recent study showing that right-leaning Facebook pages earned more engagement than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages in 2020 and 2021.

Despite this reality, platforms have actually bent their rules and given preferential treatment to right-wing media and politicians. In the lead up to another presidential election and amid recurring election misinformation and conspiracy theories, platforms are further capitulating to right-wing pressure — loosening content moderation policies, downsizing content moderation and safety teams, and reinstating accounts known for pushing misinformation.

Meta is deprioritizing content moderation and user safety

Since the start of 2022, Meta has gradually reverted its policies and practices to how they were prior to the insurrection. The company has restored the previously banned accounts of political candidates and vowed not to fact-check them, with Trump regaining access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts. More recently, Meta has restored access to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was banned for spreading dangerous COVID-19 misinformation.

Meta has also laid off about a quarter of its workforce since November, cutting teams focused on site security, privacy and integrity.

Below is a timelineof key developments since the start of 2022:

June 22, 2022: Meta considers eliminating its COVID-19 misinformation policies, asking its oversight board to advise the company on whether to maintain its policies against dangerous COVID-19 misinformation, claiming that “the COVID-19 situation has evolved.”

July 26, 2022: Meta's oversight board accepts the company’s request to revise its COVID-19 misinformation policy, kicking off its advisory process and requesting public comments to inform its recommendations. (The oversight board’s policy advisory opinions are not binding; they require only that Meta provide a public response and follow-up actions.)

September 22, 2022: Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg indicates in an interview with Semafor that Facebook might end Trump’s suspension in January 2023 without considering the accuracy of (or the risk posed by) his content.

November 9, 2022: Meta announces that it will eliminate more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce, choosing to sink more money into its efforts to build the “metaverse.”

January 17, 2023: The Washington Post reports that House January 6 committee investigators found — but ultimately did not publish — mountains of evidence demonstrating that social media companies “like Facebook and Twitter” provided “megaphones” for right-wing extremists ahead of the Capitol insurrection and refused to enforce their own content moderation policies out of fear of conservative backlash.

January 25, 2023: Meta announces that it will be reinstating Trump’s account in the coming weeks, along with a new “Crisis Policy Protocol,” and “Restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest” policy. With this decision, Meta gives Trump the green light to push harmful misinformation and extremism on its platforms, reportedly telling CNN’s Oliver Darcy that “posts attacking 2020 will be allowed, but posts attacking 2024 are a different story.”

February 9, 2023: Meta reinstates Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

March 14, 2023: Meta announces a second round of mass layoffs, cutting another 10,000 people from its workforce including those focused on site security, privacy, and integrity.

March 17, 2023: Trump posts on Facebook for the first time since his account was reinstated.

March 30, 2023: After news broke that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict Trump for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, Trump posts a full copy of his misinformation-filled statement to his newly reinstated Facebook page.

June 4, 2023:Instagram reinstates the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine figures in the U.S. Kennedy was banned from the platform in 2021 for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies, but since “he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” Meta decided to reinstate his account. Kennedy had been pressuring the platform to do so on Twitter in the days leading up to the decision. Right-wing media, meanwhile, have  the platform announced that it will reverse its policy against election misinformation and no longer remove content that “advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” While Trump was seemingly avoiding livestreaming on YouTube to avoid being banned for violating the platform’s election policies, he may use the feature now that his election lies will be tolerated.

Right-wing media figures and outlets have credited Twitter and owner Elon Musk for “moving the needle” around election misinformation, implying that his actions influenced YouTube’s decision.

Here’s a timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

November 5, 2022: The New York Times reports thatYouTube “may have misinformation blind spots” and that its election integrity policy prohibits election misinformation only during presidential elections, not during midterm elections. In the Times piece, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone described the policy as tantamount to building “a sprinkler system after the building is on fire.”

January 20, 2023: Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces that parent company Alphabet will be laying off 12,000 employees, or 6% of the company’s global workforce. This includes more than 100 YouTube employees.

February 1, 2023: YouTube begins sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on the platform, providing a new form of monetization. This means right-wing influencers who litter the platform with anti-LGBTQ vitriol, racist and misogynistic rhetoric, and COVID-19 misinformation may stand to gain financially from their harmful content.

March 17, 2023: YouTube announces that it will be immediately lifting Trump’s suspension on the platform and allowing him to upload new content. Though the platform claims that it “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence,” the decision fails to account for Trump’s propensity to push extreme rhetoric and the platform’s weak misinformation policies and haphazard enforcement.

June 2, 2023: YouTube reverses its policy to allow 2020 election lies, claiming: “Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. … With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections." Right-wing media celebrate the decision.

Twitter has devolved into a dysfunctional cesspool of conspiracy theories and bigotry, losing half of its advertising revenue since Musk took over in October 2022<... zzz Elon Musk’s leadership has plunged Twitter into chaos, with his misguided “free speech” crusade transforming the platform into an engine of radicalization and a steady source of harmful content. He had driven away half the site’s top 100 advertisers after a month as CEO and recently admitted to having reduced its revenue by half.

The platform now has minimal content moderation, minimal staff, and paid (and unreliable) verification. Musk has caved to authoritarian governments and reinstated previously banned accounts of extremists (including Trump, who has yet to tweet).

A timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

April 4, 2022: News breaks that Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder.

April 5, 2022: Twitter's then-CEO Parag Agrawal announces that Musk has been given a seat on Twitter’s board, prompting right-wing media to ask Musk to end Twitter's nonexistent censorship and bring Trump back to the platform.

April 10, 2022: Musk decides not to join Twitter’s board.

April 14, 2022: Musk offers to buy Twitter for about $44 billion.

July 22, 2022: A Twitter spokesperson confirms that the targeted use of “groomer” as a slur against another user “based on their perceived membership in a protected category” violates the platform’s hate speech policies. They further identified its use “in context of discussion of gender identity” as prohibited under Twitter’s Hateful Conduct policy. (Enforcement was extremely uneven and use of the term skyrocketed after Musk acquired the platform.)

October 3, 2022: Musk offers to buy Twitter at the original share price of $44 billion. Right-wing media celebrate.

October 27, 2022: Musk completes the $44 billion deal and takes control of Twitter, tweeting “the bird is freed” after firing former Twitter executives and sending out an email to staff saying that layoffs were set to begin. Per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Musk also dismisses Twitter’s board, making himself the sole leader. Previously banned Twitter users celebrate, and QAnon supporters make clear that they see the takeover as a green light to rejoin the platform.

October 28, 2022: Musk flexes his new power by issuing a directive, without any context or rationale, to change the page logged-out users see when they go to Twitter.com to the “explore” page, which shows trending tweets and news stories, rather than a sign-up form.

November 3 and 4, 2022: Twitter undertakes mass layoffs, firing over 3,000 people — or around 50% of Twitter’s workforce — including the entire ethical-AI team and most of the company’s communications team.

November 6, 2022: Reportedly without informing the policy team, Musk tweets, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended,” after some users mimicked Musk’s account.

November 7, 2022: Musk tweets out a link to “The Twitter Rules” with the caption “Twitter rules will evolve over time, but they’re currently the following.” This leads to confusion about whether misinformation violates Twitter’s policies. (The platform has a separate page on Twitter’s Help Center website that addresses misleading information.)

November 9, 2022: Twitter launches Twitter Blue, which asks users to pay for a blue verification check mark for $7.99 per month. QAnon influencers use the service to try to regain a foothold on the platform, and other right-wing extremists begin using their newly purchased check marks to spread hate.

November 10, 2022: Six Twitter executives resign: Yoel Roth (head of moderation and safety), Lea Kissner (chief information security officer), Marianne Fogarty (chief compliance officer), Kathleen Pacini (head of human resources and talent management), Damien Kieran (chief privacy officer), and John Debay (director of software engineering). Several other members of the site’s privacy and security unit resign as well, prompting “a rare warning from the Federal Trade Commission.”

November 11, 2022: Just days after Twitter Blue launched and caused mayhem — with subscribers impersonating numerous users and brands — Musk reportedly pauses the program, but allows users already subscribed, including extremists, to keep their subscriptions.

November 12, 2022: Twitter undertakes a second wave of mass layoffs, impacting about 4,400 contractors.

November 14, 2022: Musk fires about a dozen employees — including multiple longtime Twitter engineers — seemingly for criticizing him.

November 15, 2022: Musk fires roughly two dozen more employees, seemingly for expressing sympathy for those fired the day before.

November 16, 2022: Musk sends a midnight email ultimatum for remaining Twitter employees: either commit to being “extremely hardcore” or quit and receive three months of severance pay. Reuters reports that hundreds of employees resigned following this email.

November 18, 2022: Musk tweets, “Freedom Fridays … ,” seemingly to announce the beginning of reinstatements of formerly banned accounts, starting with comedian Kathy Griffin, The Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, and conservative satire site The Babylon Bee.

November 19, 2022: After launching a poll about whether Twitter should reinstate Trump’s account — which was permanently suspended following the January 6 Capitol insurrection “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” — Musk tweets, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.”

November 24, 2022: After Musk posts another poll, Twitter begins granting “amnesty” to previously suspended accounts that had “not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

November 29, 2022: Twitter stops enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policies, providing no further details beyond a note on its site reading, “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

December 12, 2022: Twitter Blue relaunches, with the stipulation that accounts will be reviewed before getting a blue check. Additionally, gold checks are rolled out for some businesses. Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council is also disbanded because, according to an email obtained by CNN, Twitter is “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.” The dissolution of the council comes less than an hour before members were scheduled to meet with Twitter executives, according to The Washington Post.

December 14, 2022: Twitter launches a new policy that users “may not publish or post other people's private information without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.” The new policy is used as justification to ban an account, @ElonJet, that tracked the location of Musk’s private jet, and those of journalists whom Musk accused of “doxxing” him by reporting on the @ElonJet account.

December 16, 2022: Musk briefly disables the Twitter Spaces feature after some of the suspended journalists were still able to access the feature and press him about why they were targeted. Twitter also announces that it is reinstating a number of accounts “where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.”

December 17, 2022: Musk reinstates most of the journalists he accused of “doxxing” him after issuing a poll that asked if they should be brought back to the platform. Later that day, Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz is suspended for allegedly violating a policy that was not yet introduced. Twitter also removes the feature that showed from which type of device a tweet was sent.

December 18, 2022: Twitter announces — and then revokes — a policy that prohibited users from promoting other social media platforms. Later in the day, Lorenz is reinstated and Twitter Safety launches a poll to see if an altered version of this policy should be reintroduced.

January 3, 2023: Musk announces that he will revoke Twitter’s years-old policy against political and issue-based advertisements. Politico later reports that in the two months following that reversal, no paid political ads were taken out on the platform.

February 3, 2023: Journalist Matt Navarra confirms that corporate Twitter accounts would have to pay $1,000 a month to keep their previously free verification status, leading a number of media organizations to reject the new verification scheme.

February 8, 2023: Musk oversees the expansion of a tweet’s size limit from 280 up to 4,000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers to end the practice of posting screenshots of longer statements, which he called an “absurdity.” Upon implementation, users report that Twitter’s main functions had crashed, leaving them unable to tweet, retweet, follow users, or send direct messages.

February 9, 2023: Following an announcement that Twitter would end free access to its application programming interface (API), journalists, researchers, advertisers, and users raise concerns over the ramifications that removing API access would have on user experience, including important and potentially lifesaving public service announcements. Despite Twitter delaying when access to API would be rescinded, multiple organizations are still unable to provide automated updates about issues including weather and transportation alerts.

February 14, 2023: After Musk’s own Super Bowl tweet earns lower engagement than President Joe Biden’s, he directs engineers to artificially inflate his presence on users' feeds to correct an “engagement issue.” This comes after Musk reportedly fired top engineers because of his declining views and supposedly threatened to fire others unless they would show more people his tweets.

February 8, 2023: Musk oversees the expansion of a tweet’s size limit from 280 up to 4,000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers to end the practice of posting screenshots of longer statements, which he called an “absurdity.” Upon implementation, users report that Twitter’s main functions had crashed, leaving them unable to tweet, retweet, follow users, or send direct messages.

March 10, 2023: After stating that it would no longer be granting free access to Twitter’s application programming interface on February 2, Musk announces that users of Twitter’s then-free API service would have to pay $2.5 million per year to retain full access.

April 2, 2023: After learning that The New York Times would not pay to keep its verification status, Musk reportedly orders that Twitter engineers remove the paper’s verification mark. Musk's decision to target the Times, one of Twitter's largest accounts, is seemingly made in response to prodding by a meme account and resulted in the Times operating several accounts under conflicting verification standards simultaneously.

April 4, 2023: Musk changes Twitter’s corporate identity to “X Corp.” as part of his still-unclear plan to have the social media platform serve as a hub for crypto exchanges, stock trading, and social media.

April 5, 2023: Musk’s Twitter falsely brands NPR and BBC accounts as “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media,” respectively, leading to NPR leaving the platform and the BBC having its designation removed after significant protest.

April 6, 2023: Amid Musk’s personal feud with the newsletter site Substack, Twitter begins limiting accounts from engaging with tweets featuring links to Substack.

April 17, 2023: After quietly removing its hate speech policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” Twitter announces that it will no longer remove certain tweets that “potentially” violate its rules against hateful conduct. Instead, it will merely apply warning labels to such tweets.

April 20, 2023: Twitter begins removing blue check verification badges from the profiles of celebrities, news outlets, and other high-profile accounts across the platform, making it difficult for users to determine which sources are reputable. As those legacy blue checks expired, Twitter continues to sell verification badges to just about anyone willing to pay a monthly fee. A couple of celebrities, including LeBron James who said he would not pay for Twitter Blue, receive a “complimentary subscription … on behalf of Elon Musk.”

May 9, 2023: Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announces that he plans to relaunch his show on Twitter, sending a shockwave through the U.S. political and media class.

May 12, 2023: A day after proclaiming that a new Twitter CEO would be starting in roughly six weeks, Musk announces Linda Yaccarino would be filling the role. Hours earlier, NBCUniversal had announced that Yaccarino, formerly the company’s chairman for Global Advertising and Partnerships, was leaving “effective immediately.” Musk continues to use the platform to push dangerous conspiracy theories and racist dog whistles.

May 24, 2023: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces his 2024 GOP presidential campaign during a disastrous Twitter Spaces event with Musk and right-wing investor David Sacks.

June 5, 2023: Yaccarino officially becomes CEO, after lawyers for the company admitted in a June 1 federal court filing that her hiring “will not result in a different content-moderation strategy” — contradicting the notion that the new CEO will solve the platform’s advertising issues.

June 8, 2023: Musk hosts a Twitter Spaces event with anti-vaccine influencer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and admits that Twitter revenue is down by half since his takeover.

June 21, 2023: Musk tweets a new Twitter policy, claiming that “cis” or “cisgender” are “considered slurs on the platform,” and that “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.” The new policy comes as Musk has repeatedly claimed in response to questions about moderation of hateful content that he is adamant about defending free speech.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-data-shows-conservatives-are-still-not-being-censored-facebook-even-engagement  falls

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-right-leaning-pages-lead-discussion-about-home-invasions-right-wing-media-and-nra

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On Facebook, right-leaning pages lead discussion about home invasions, with right-wing media and the NRA praising homeowners who shoot suspected intruders

Right-leaning Facebook pages earned 65% of total interactions on posts about home invasions, despite sharing only 25% of them

Special PROGRAMS

GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY

WRITTEN BY NATALIE MATHES

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CARLY EVANS

PUBLISHED 04/26/23

On Facebook in the last year, right-wing media outlets have amplified sensational posts that praise people who have shot, and in some instances killed, alleged home intruders.

In a new study, Media Matters compiled and analyzed Facebook posts about home invasions from news and politics pages in the last year and found that right-leaning pages earned 65% of total interactions on posts about home invasions, despite sharing only 25% of them. Among these right-leaning pages are right-wing media outlets and the National Rifle Association.

A series of recent shootings have refocused the nation’s attention on so-called “castle doctrine” — the idea that a person doesn’t have a “duty to retreat” before using deadly force to defend themselves when in their home — and “stand your ground” laws that apply this idea outside the home, using what critics call a “shoot first, ask questions later” model that allows “anyone who believes their life to be in danger to use lethal force in an act of self-defense, without any duty to retreat.”

On April 13, an elderly man in Kansas City, Missouri, shot teenager Ralph Yarl in the head after Yarl mistakenly rang the home's doorbell while he was trying to pick up his siblings. On April 15, a homeowner in rural New York shot and killed 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis when a car she was riding in pulled into his driveway by accident while searching for a friend’s house. On April 18, a man in Florida shot a 6-year-old girl, her parents, and another neighbor after a basketball accidentally rolled onto his property. The next day, a man in Texas shot two high school cheerleaders who had mistaken his car for their own after a late-night practice.

According to an April 22 report by Insider, gun violence experts say that these recent shootings are “a larger symptom of a distinctly American culture that empowers people to open fire, even when there's no real threat.” This violent culture stems from the NRA’s decades-long campaign pushing “stand your ground” laws across the nation.

Most Americans are not satisfied with existing gun laws, but right-wing media continue to defend the role guns play in America. For example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed in January that assault weapons “are not a threat to anybody,” and the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said that guns had “nothing to do with” a recent mass shooting in Nashville. Salem Media Group’s Dennis Prager has falsely insisted that “there's no way to stop the ubiquity of guns” in America, and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk has claimed, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

By defending the role guns play in America and working to convince Americans that there is no real possibility of passing stronger gun control measures in the U.S., right-wing media encourage the false belief that the only way to make ourselves safer is to take matters into our own hands and further arm ourselves. This provides cover for politicians who work with the NRA and, conveniently, creates bigger business for gun sellers.

In the last year — from April 20, 2022, through April 20, 2023 — Facebook has enabled the NRA and right-wing media outlets to sensationalize and amplify stories about alleged home invasions across its platform. Several of these stories pushed the narrative that people need to own guns in order to defend their families, and even praised people who shoot and kill alleged home intruders. 

In the last year, right-leaning Facebook pages shared only 25% of posts about home invasions but earned 65% of total interactions

In the last year, Facebook pages that regularly post about U.S. news and politics shared at least 8,100 posts about home invasions, earning over 6.5 million total interactions. Right-leaning pages shared only 25% of these posts (about 2,000) but earned 65% of total interactions, amounting to over 4.2 million.

Several of these posts praised elderly homeowners in particular for shooting, and in some instances killing, alleged home intruders, with Rumble’s Steven Crowder captioning one such post “nice shot.” Others celebrated instances when it was revealed that homeowners would not be charged for shooting and killing people who trespassed on their property.

Home invasion Facebook posts praising elderly

Home invasion Facebook posts celebrating no charges

Ideologically nonaligned Facebook pages shared 72% of posts (nearly 6,000), but earned only 30% of total interactions (nearly 2 million). Left-leaning pages shared only 3% of posts (about 200) and earned 5% of total interactions, amounting to 294,000.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020. For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here. The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.   Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts about home invasions from the pages

The NRA earned 17% of total interactions on Facebook posts about home invasions in the last year, despite sharing just 0.1% of them

The NRA's official Facebook page earned the most total interactions on posts about home invasions during the time frame studied. The page earned over 1.1 million total interactions on just 9 such posts, meaning the NRA shared just 0.1% of Facebook posts about home invasions from U.S. news and politics pages over the last year, but earned 17% of total interactions.

After the NRA, the 6 Facebook pages that earned the most total interactions on posts about home invasions were pages for right-wing outlets, organizations, and personalities. In order, they include Blue Lives Matter, Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, Colion Noir, and TheBlaze.

home invasion other top 6 collage

The top 6 posts that earned the most total interactions were from the NRA, and all featured headlines praising homeowners for shooting alleged intruders.

NRA Facebook posts about home invasions

The NRA has also run at least 115 ads on Meta platforms over the last year on an additional Facebook page. These ads endorsed midterm candidates it claimed would defend your “right to protect your home and family” and attacked candidates it claimed would “leave your family defenseless.” Facebook earned at least $500,000 on these ads, which reached an estimated audience of up to 60.9 million users.

NRA Meta Ads home invasion

Networks of Facebook pages operated by right-wing outlets amplified numerous stories praising homeowners for shooting, and in some instances killing, alleged home intruders

Facebook has a history of profiting from networks of right-wing pages that exploit its platform to amplify various right-wing talking points — including conservative narratives around gun ownership.

The Western Journal shared nearly 350 posts about home invasions in the last year across 19 Facebook pages, collectively earning nearly 160,000 total interactions. Some of these posts featured an article praising a resident for sending suspects “running for their lives,” while others claimed, “You know what they say — real gun control means hitting your target. And this homeowner did just that.”

Western Journal home invasion collage

TheBlaze shared 195 posts about home invasions in the last year across 10 Facebook pages, collectively earning more than 300,000 total interactions. Some of these posts featured an article claiming that “armed home invaders wearing ski masks” shot a homeowner, but that homeowner also had a gun and shot “both crooks dead.” Others featured an article headlined, “Video: It’s all smiles before crooks invade home; seconds later it’s all backsides as they run for their lives from homeowner firing ‘AK-47-style’ gun at them.”

TheBlaze collage of home invasion posts

The Daily Wire’s network shared 160 posts about home invasions in the last year across 7 Facebook pages, collectively earning at least 285,000 total interactions on these posts — some of which cited “castle doctrine” as protecting a woman in Texas who fatally shot an alleged home invader.

The Daily Wire home invasion collage

Fox News shared 24 posts about home invasions in the last year across 3 Facebook pages, collectively earning more than 200,000 total interactions. Some of these posts praised elderly homeowners for turning the tables on suspected home invaders.

Fox News home invasion collage

Methodology...

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https://boingboing.net/2023/03/16/mark-zuckerbergs-metaverse-now-a-deserted-fantasyland.html

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-right-leaning-pages-are-leading-conversation-about-trumps-arraignment

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

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

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/misinformation-about-recent-whale-deaths-dominated-discussions-offshore-wind-energy

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:{:{after a slew of whale deaths along the east coast of the U.S., right-wing media have been promoting false fossil fuel industry talking points about offshore wind projects on Facebook.}:

Media Matters found that in the first two months of 2023, from January 1 - March 1:

Of the 288 posts that mention wind energy, nearly 84% specifically mentioned the unsubstantiated claim that offshore wind farms impact whale populations. These posts received 73,457 (73%) out of 101,277 interactions on posts about wind energy.

22 out of the top 50 most-interacted with posts about offshore wind energy contained misinformation claiming that they may be responsible for whale deaths on the East Coast.

None of the posts with misinformation had fact-checks from Facebook moderators, and nearly all of them were from right-leaning pages.}:

Right-leaning pages earned 90% of interactions on posts about wind energy.

Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects.

According to NOAA and other experts, there is no evidence that proposed offshore projects have contributed to what the agency is calling an “unusual mortality event.”

:{:{Ramping up offshore wind development has been a focus of Biden’s energy agenda. In 2021, the administration set a goal of deploying 30 Gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. More recently, the Inflation Reduction Act granted $100 million for offshore wind projects and reopened additional areas for lease in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic for wind development. }:

This effort, along with concerns over what is causing whale mortality, has mobilized clean energy opponents and sparked extensive coverage and discussion on Facebook, driven almost entirely by right-leaning pages.}:

84% of Facebook posts about wind energy also mentioned whale populations

Out of the 288 posts on the topic of wind energy from the study period, 241, or 84%, specifically mentioned whale populations. From December 1 to March 1, 16 humpback whales have been stranded on or near beaches in states along the Atlantic coast, mostly in New Jersey and New York. North Atlantic Right Whales have also been experiencing an unusual mortality event along the Atlantic Coast since 2017; 6 have been found dead so far in 2023.

Currently, there are only two functional wind farms in the U.S., with about 20 proposed offshore wind projects in various stages of development in 11 states along the East Coast. This has become the perfect opportunity for anti-renewable activists and fossil fuels industry shills posing as environmentalists sympathetic to the plight of whales to launch a public relations and legal campaign in opposition to these offshore wind projects.

Right-wing media, and particularly Fox News,have propelled these efforts in response to Biden’s push for offshore wind. One of the top posts with the most interactions, about 1,600, featured a FoxNews.com article with a headline that read, “SOMETHING FISHY: Congressman says green energy projects may be to blame for animal deaths.” That Congressman isRep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who introduced legislation that would mandate a federal investigation into the role wind energy development may have played in the recent uptick in whale deaths.

Fox News article with image of beached whale

Smith isn’t the only lawmaker that spoke out after extensive right-wing media coverage. Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), as well as a dozen New Jersey mayors have all called for a moratorium on offshore wind construction.

Another popular post was a screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley, a right-wing podcaster, former Trump official, and former Fox News contributor. The post suggests environmentalists do not care about whales dying because, in this instance, it does not fit their political agenda. It was shared by several pages affiliated with The Western Journal, including the Tea Party Community and Conservative Tribune. The February 13 tweet itself had over 100,000 likes, shares, and comments.

screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley

22 out of the top 50 posts with the most interactions about offshore wind and whales contained misinformation on the topic.

Nearly half of the top 50 posts examined by Media Matters incorrectly linked whale deaths to offshore wind projects.

The most popular post from our study, which had nearly 19,500 interactions, was a clip from the January 11 edition of Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime where Watters claimed that surveying for wind projects is killing whales. On January 11, Watters did a segment on his prime time show where he attempted to misleadingly portray Protect Our Coasts NJ as a grassroots oceans advocacy organization.

Jesse Watters plays video of beached whale

The second most popular post, which had almost 15,500 interactions came from Power the Future, whose founder, Daniel Turner, is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute. The post links to an opinion piece by Turner claiming that “radical environmentalists” are blaming whale deaths on fishing communities when they should, without evidence, be blaming wind farms.

Power The Future posts an article about "radical wind farm activists" from the Daily Caller

None of the posts were labeled as misleading by Facebook fact-checkers

None of the posts which contained blatant misinformation were labeled as such by Facebook through its fact-checking partnerships. In general, these posts failed to note NOAA’s statement on the topic or statements from any experts that have pointed out the improbability of a connection between the mortality event and offshore wind, especially given that whales face many other risks such as vessel strikes and entanglement. Some posts also accused environmentalists, Democrats and the Biden administration of being dismissive about the plight of whales. In reality, Biden’s massive investments in renewable energy may actually be key to helping save marine life; burning fossil fuels is impacting the species by limiting the availability of their food and changing marine migration patterns.

Other social media posts that were not included in this study and contain similar misinformation on the topic have been repeatedly fact-checked by other sites.

:{:{Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects}:

Several posts Media Matters looked at featured articles and reports from USA Today, NPR, POLITICO, and Greenpeace that called out this misinformation campaign around offshore wind.

However, these debunks were outnumbered by content that, even if it acknowledged the lack of evidence to support anti-wind talking points, still gave them credence by repeating them over and over again without an immediate debunk and framing the issue as a real debate when very few groups actually disagree with NOAA, and those that do have no evidence to support their claims. Some coverage is also omitting or muddling key details about how far along the wind projects are to make them seem more directly correlated with whale deaths. }:

Even left-leaning pages were complicit in this. For example, a NowThis video asked: “Could Offshore Wind Developments be Causing Whales to Die?” The answer is no, but that isn’t evident until the end of the video.

All in all, the fact that content about all of the benefits offshore wind could bring to coastal communities paled in comparison to perceived harms reveals the success of fossil fuel industry propaganda online.

Is offshore wind killing whales?

Conservative New Jersey activist jumps into anti-wind crusade

Out of all of the posts about whales and offshore wind, 31 posts (13%) came from the page of a conservative activist Joseph Rudy Rullo, who unsuccessfully ran for New Jersey governor in 2017. So far, in 2023, Rullo has dedicated his Facebook page which has 384,000 followers, to spreading misinformation about offshore wind development and bashing New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy for opting to not implement a moratorium on offshore wind development off of the New Jersey coast. He has also been used as a source on the topic for local New Jersey news.

Rullo has directed his followers to take steps to actively oppose offshore wind projects, such as attending New Jersey EPA meetings as well as the February 19 rally to “save the whales.” At the rally, “organizers” with the fossil fuel industry front group Protect Our Oceans NJ addressed the crowd along with lawmakers.

Right-leaning pages posted the most about wind energy compared to left-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages

Right-leaning pages that post about news and politics have almost completely dominated the Facebook conversation about wind energy in general, not just offshore wind. Right-leaning pages posted more often, and earned more total interactions than either nonaligned or left-leaning pages. Right-leaning pages earned over 91,300 interactions on posts about wind energy, or 90% of all interactions on posts about wind energy, while nonaligned pages earned over 5,800 interactions (6%), and left-leaning pages earned 4,077 interactions (4%).

Right-leaning Facebook pages made 192 posts about wind energy issues, over twice the volume of nonaligned pages, which had 81 posts. Left-leaning pages made just 15 posts. All in all, right-leaning pages made up 67%, or nearly three-quarters of Facebook posts about wind energy.

These posts mainly focused on offshore wind projects and marine life, but also pushed misinformation about the functionality of wind turbines on land and their environmental impact, in addition to making exaggerated statements about how often they experience structural issues.

For example, one Newsmax headline suggested that green energy is flawed while in the same video a Newsmax correspondent admitted that according to the Department of Energy, the “reliability rate of a wind turbine is about 98% so these collapses and failures are quite rare by industry standards.”

Jon Glasgow on wind turbines on American Agenda

The threat that wind turbines pose to birds, which has long been exaggerated and pale in comparison to other threats to avian life such as climate change, buildings, pesticides, and domestic cats was also a theme. The idea has been a staple of climate change deniers with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, such as Robert Bryce and more recently resurrected by renewable energy skeptics on Twitter.

Methodology

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.

For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.

The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were related to wind energy or whales deaths that contained the keywords: “wind energy,” “wind turbines,” “wind turbine,” “wind farm,” “wind farms,” “offshore wind,” “wind projects,” “wind project,” “wind development," “dead whale,” “whale death,” or “whale deaths” in the post itself or in the headline or description of any included link from January 1, 2023, through March 1, 2023.

Two Media Matters researchers then reviewed the posts to determine which ones were relevant to the topic of wind energy, and which were relevant to the topic of offshore wind and whales specifically.

Finally, researchers coded 50 posts with the most interactions to determine whether they contained misinformation about offshore wind and whale mortality. Misinformation in this case was defined as the suggestion that there is evidence that offshore wind development, most frequently the sonar used in undersea surveys, has been or may be contributing to whale deaths. If coding differed, posts were reviewed and discussed to reach a consensus.

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04/04/1

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MARGARET BRENNAN (HOST): Quickly, Scott, you know, we are looking at the potential indictment of the 45th president of the United States, who is back on social media platforms. Have there been any measures put in place that would limit the ability to use this as an organizing tool or in a dangerous way as he calls for protests?

SCOTT GALLOWAY (NYU PROFESSOR): Not that I know of. I find it kind of borderline comical, this, this kind of hollow debate around First Amendment or speech or pretending -- these organizations pretending it was a really difficult decision. It's pretty straightforward. I mean, an organization or an individual adds shareholder value to these companies one of two ways, they create a lot of engagement through enragement or awe or they spend a lot of money on the platform. And about the time that President Trump was about to become much less enraging or have much less content, about a few days before Biden's inauguration, Meta found their backbone and kicked him off. And about the time he's about to spend another billion or billion and a half on media, they've all the sudden decided he should come back on the platform. But my understanding is the president, President Trump has called for protests and the last time he called for protests we had an insurrection. So, if they've ever wanted an excuse not to put him back on the platforms but they have it. But at the end of the day, this is all about what drives shareholder value, not any sense of what connects us or any fidelity to the commonwealth.

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https://www.mediamatters.org**/google/youtube-just-reinstated-trump**-and-its-weak-policies-will-allow-him-spread-harmful

https://www.mediamatters.org/**facebook/trump-called-protests-meta-profited-his-newly-reinstated-facebook-page**

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/daily-wire-has-earned-millions-facebook-interactions-amplifying-anti-trans-content

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site supposedly secretly founded by Alex Jones to promote misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other content from his outlet Infowars has earned well over a million interactions on Facebook, even though Meta has had a ban on Infowars content since 2019.

According to an investigation of Jones’ 2019 and 2020 text messages — which were leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center during litigation of the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits — Jones started the site National File “to promote Infowars content and to establish a business vehicle for his son.” The investigation further revealed that “the Jones family appears to be bankrolling National File as a clearinghouse for Infowars content,” as Jones told operative Roger Stone in a text message on February 13, 2020, “off record this is my site.”

On May 2, 2019, Facebook announced a ban on Alex Jones and Infowars, with The Atlantic reporting at the time that “Facebook and Instagram will remove any content containing Infowars videos, radio segments, or articles (unless the post is explicitly condemning the content), and Facebook will also remove any groups set up to share Infowars content and events promoting any of the banned extremist figures.” Roughly two months later, a domain was registered for National File, and several affiliated social media accounts were created. Like the main Infowars network, National File is known for spreading misinformation, and as the SPLC notes, the site has collaborated with Infowars. Additionally, one of National File’s highest profile figures, Patrick Howley, is known for rampant antisemitism.

A Media Matters analysis found that Jones successfully circumvented Facebook’s ban, using National File as a vehicle to promote himself and spread Infowars content. Using CrowdTangle, we compiled and analyzed posts that contained “nationalfile.com” and were posted by Facebook pages, verified accounts, or in public groups between May 2, 2019 — when Facebook announced its ban on Infowars — and March 14, 2023. During this time frame, there were nearly 12,000 public Facebook posts mentioning and/or linking to National File’s website, with the posts earning more than 1.2 million interactions. And another tracking tool, BuzzSumo, showed that multiple articles from National File have received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements each.

In addition to the website being shared across Facebook, Facebook’s parent company Meta has profited from the site: According to Meta’s Ad Library, the National File Facebook page has run multiple ads, with some of the ads eventually being removed for violating the platform’s ad policies. The Ad Library also shows multiple ads that have featured and linked to National File. [grf]

ifowars’ ability to circumvent its ban on Meta’s platforms is not limited to National File: Meta has struggled to prevent content from Infowars’ streaming platform banned.video from spreading on Facebook. SPLC also reported that Jones’ texts showed Jones and National File’s then-editor-in-chief in 2020 discussed “how to use Jones’ new banned.video domain to get around the ‘idiots’ in Facebook’s content moderation division.” According to CrowdTangle, banned.video has been mentioned and/or linked to in nearly 14,000 public Facebook posts since May 2019, earning at least 170,000 interactions. Meta has also allowed ads that featured and linked to banned.video.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-remains-source-anti-vaccine-conspiracy-theories

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It’s not just Amgen and Horizon — America’s biggest corporations are trying to get even bigger. That’s bad for consumers, public health, and innovation.

Amazon is attempting to acquire One Medical for $3.9 billion,⁴ a move that would help Amazon on its path towards becoming a health care monopoly. Facebook’s parent, Meta, is trying to acquire a prominent VR company.⁵ Two major railroad companies are trying to merge for $27 billion, continuing consolidation in the railroad industry that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has called seriously concerning.⁶^

This is not an extensive list, just some examples of the attempts by corporate giants to consolidate their power. But we have federal antitrust laws to protect competition and to protect consumers from worse products for higher prices. Our elected leaders and regulatory agencies must do everything in their power to more frequently and forcefully scrutinize and, when necessary, block these mergers.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/metas-policies-wont-stop-trump-pushing-election-misinformation-ahead-2024

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Meta's policies won't stop Trump from pushing election misinformation ahead of 2024

Once Trump returns to Facebook, he will likely spread the same unhinged election conspiracy theories he’s been sharing on Truth Social

Written by Natalie Mathes & Spencer Silva

Published 01/30/23

Facebook is reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump two years after he was suspended for using the platform to incite a violent insurrection. Meta’s policies are unlikely to prevent Trump from sharing election misinformation on the platform, and if his recent posts on Truth Social are any indication, that’s exactly what he will do.

On January 25, Meta announced that Trump will be reinstated on Facebook and Instagram “in the coming weeks” — two years after he was suspended for inciting violence on January 6, 2021. After evaluating the current environment according to its Crisis Policy Protocol — an internal framework the company reveals little about — Meta decided that “the risk to public safety” has “sufficiently receded,” which is a blatantly flawed assessment, and that there are no “extraordinary circumstances” that would justify “extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period.”

When announcing Trump’s reinstatement, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg told Axios, “We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election.” However, according to Semafor, Clegg has indicated that the “accuracy or sentiment” of Trump’s content would not be a “driving factor” in the decision, and when asked by NBC News’ Hallie Jackson whether “an effort by Trump to delegitimize an election by lying about it would lead to another suspension,” Clegg “suggested that it would not, unless it clearly led to ‘imminent and real-world harm.’” Further, Meta reportedly told CNN’s Oliver Darcy that “posts attacking 2020 will be allowed, but posts attacking 2024 are a different story.”

Meta often fails to be proactive, only taking action once crises are already unfolding, until harm is imminent, or until public outcry reaches a fever pitch. Even though CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly admitted that Trump had used Facebook “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government,” and the company later acknowledged that there was “a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election,” it continued to allow most forms of election misinformation to go unchecked.

In the midst of the 2022 midterm elections, for instance, instead of preventing claims about rigged voting machines and other voter fraud conspiracy theories, the company opted to rely on third-party fact-checkers to flag misinformation, inconsistently labeling misinformative posts while claiming to reduce their spread. Earlier this month, Media Matters reported that right-leaning pages and users were still able to post about and interact with the type of “Stop the Steal” misinformation that congressional investigators found set the stage for the insurrection.

Since his ban from Facebook and other mainstream platforms, Trump has continued pushing election misinformation on his social media platform Truth Social, including repeatedly posting claims about rigged voting machines and amplifying adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. If his posts on that platform are any indication, Trump’s Facebook feed will quickly resemble an incessant stream of election misinformation and grievances about the outcomes of the 2020 and 2022 elections, and Facebook will allow it.

Trump’s unhinged posts on Truth Social called the results of Arizona’s election into question

On November 8, 2022, the day of the midterm elections, Trump fired off a suite of unhinged posts preemptively calling into question the results of Arizona’s election.

    When some vote tabulation machines malfunctioned on Election Day, causing long waits at some polling locations, Trump posted a message to voters, telling his supporters to stay in line before casting their votes and speculated, “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY. Don’t let it happen!” And before any votes were even counted, Trump began to suggest that the machine errors were “familiar” — presumably a shout out to his debunked claims of election malfeasance in the state during 2020. (The Guardian reported Friday that Trump secretly donated $1 million to the discredited election audit aimed at calling into question the results of the state’s 2020 elections.)

    In another post, the former president baselessly speculated that the “so-called Voting Machines” in Maricopa County were not counting votes in heavily Republican precincts, which he claimed had “greatly harmed” gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, and other Republican candidates. He then called upon the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, to launch a partisan investigation of the election to “save our Country from this Cancer from within!!!”

Trump Truth Social election misinfo collage

As votes were counted in Arizona and Trump’s preferred candidates were losing, the former president amped up his rhetoric about “rigged” elections:

    On November 11, Trump said that “Voting Machines in large numbers didn’t work” in Maricopa County on Election Day and claimed that malfunctioning equipment that required voters to wait in line amounted to “a scam and voter fraud, no different than stuffing the ballot boxes. They stole the Election from Blake Masters!”

    Over the next several days, Trump amplified unfounded claims of election fraud to his millions of followers with messages like “Rigged Elections.” He even called for a new election in the state because “Idiot, and possibly corrupt, officials have lost control of the tainted Election in Arizona.”

    On November 14, Trump claimed that an election victory “is slowly, yet systematically, being drained away” from Lake because of fraud. Later that day, he claimed, “Wow! They just took the election away from Kari Lake. It’s really bad out there!”

On Truth Social, Trump has frequently spread the false claim that the 2020 election was “Rigged and Stolen”

In addition to his posts about the midterm elections, Trump has regularly proclaimed that the 2020 election was, in his words, “Rigged and Stolen.”

    In early May, Trump claimed that Democrats’ “biggest LIE, by far, is the results of the Presidential Election. They know it, and so does everyone else!” A few days later, Trump claimed that Dinesh D’Souza’s 2,000 Mulesfilm showed “conclusively that the 2020 Presidential Election was Rigged and Stolen.” (The film's central conspiracy theory of ballot trafficking by “mules” has been thoroughly debunked.)

During that same time period, in response to allegations that Trump and his team had attempted to tamper with Georgia’s 2020 election, Trump wrote that he had authority to pressure election officials to “find” votes because “as President I am the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the U.S.” He added: “The Election was Rigged and Stolen!”

    Last month, addressing Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Trump claimed that the Twitter Files provided evidence of the “FBI and ‘Justice’ illegally colluding, proving conclusively, in one more very powerful way, that the 2020 Presidential Election was Rigged & Stolen.”

    In just the past week, Trump has praised January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots” or pushed rhetoric about stolen elections in at least 13 posts, including by promoting an election denial book by his lawyer, amplifying numerous debunked claims about fraud in Georgia during the 2020 election, and calling the 2020 election “rigged.”

Despite the January 6 panel’s findings that Facebook acted as a launching pad for the violent attack on the Capitol, fueled by Trump’s election lies on the platform, the company decided to allow the former president back on its platforms, with virtually no guardrails showing it has learned practically nothing since the insurrection.

The Latest

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    01/30/23 1:22 PM EST

    Pennsylvania Republicans are working with a “Stop the Steal” and QAnon conspiracy theorist

    01/30/23 12:15 PM EST

    Meta's policies won't stop Trump from pushing election misinformation ahead of 2024

    01/30/23 11:07 AM EST

    Angelo Carusone on MSNBC: “The greatest threat for extremism going forward is this groomer narrative. ... It is no longer just limited to the fever swamps.”

    01/29/23 8:24 PM EST

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    01/28/23 10:31 AM EST

    Facebook

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Related

    Meta, Fox News, and the collapse of the anti-January 6 consensus

    01/27/23 10:47 AM EST

    Meta just gave Trump the green light to push harmful misinformation and extremism on its platforms

    01/25/23 5:48 PM EST

    Report: January 6 investigators confirm that social media platforms “bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives” ahead of the insurrection

    01/18/23

===

mma 1 23

Meta announced this week that it will be reinstating former President Donald Trump on Facebook and Instagram following his recent reinstatement on Twitter, which also banned Trump for his dangerous rhetoric after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Meta and Twitter’s decisions will mean that the disgraced ex-president will soon have access to all the social media giants, giving him a platform to spread misinformation to billions of global users — but for Trump’s right-wing media allies, these concessions still don’t go far enough.

Meta announced on January 25 that it believes the threat to public safety posed by Trump has “sufficiently receded” to allow him back on its platforms “in the coming weeks.” Additionally, the company put an updated protocol in place to restrict accounts of Trump or other public figures who incite violence during civil unrest. However, following Trump’s announcement that he would be running for president again in 2024, Meta reportedly sent a memo saying it would not be fact-checking the candidate even as he was espousing QAnon conspiracy theories on his own platform, Truth Social.

The decision to reinstate Trump comes as Meta is still dealing with election misinformation more than two years after his suspension. A recent Media Matters study found that right-leaning Facebook pages shared 65,500 election-related posts that earned over 60 million interactions in 2022, often spreading misinformation. Reinstating Trump will only further this problem on the platform, as he has continued to spout misinformation about elections on Truth Social and still maintains a large reach on Facebook that will continue to grow as his campaign pumps money into Facebook ads. As Media Matters President Angelo Carusone pointed out:

Trump’s Truth Social account has shown us exactly how he’d use Facebook if let back on the platform. He has promoted what Facebook describes as a ‘militarized’ movement hundreds of times, and in the week after the midterm elections, nearly half (48%) of Trump's posts on Truth Social amplified QAnon-promoting accounts or pushed election misinformation.

Make no mistake — by allowing Donald Trump back on its platforms, Meta is refueling Trump’s misinformation and extremism engine.

Following the announcement, Fox News got an exclusive interview with Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who claimed, “We're not a political entity. We don't try and make decisions that help or hinder one side or the other.” Yet despite this huge boon to online conservatism by Trump's reinstatement to major platforms, right-wing personalities are still complaining that social media companies like Meta have discriminated against Trump and other conservatives. Right-wing media have continued to attack the company for supposedly conspiring with Democrats and the “deep state” to suppress free speech, and they insist that reinstating Trump’s account is “overdue” because he “did nothing wrong.”

Here are some examples of how right-wing media responded to Meta’s announcement that it would be reinstating Trump’s account:

• On the January 25 edition of Fox News’The Ingraham Angle, Fox contributorMollie Hemingway condemned Meta despite Trump’s reinstatement, stating, “Facebook in general has done so much to attack freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the freedom of free people to debate.” Hemingway argued that “finally, two years later, after meddling in election after election, now they are finally saying, ‘Oh well, he can come back now.’ This isn't even coming close to making right what he did to the country and what they continue to do.”
• Former Trump appointee and right-wing media commentator Monica Crowley agreed with Hemingway, stating, “Frankly, the word ‘deplatforming’ is actually just a euphemism for totalitarian control. These people in Big Tech are our tech overlords. They do control the modern public square. And they do have all of the power to not just silence somebody, but to crush them, to basically erase them from the face of the Earth. That is the kind of power that they now have, to the point that they could actually suspend and destroy a sitting president, as Mollie said.” Crowley also complained about “the hundreds of millions of dollars that Mark Zuckerberg and his team poured into swing states and swing districts in order to influence the election and deny Donald Trump reelection. All of this is of a piece.”
• An article published on **The Gateway Pundit** on January 25 sided with Trump, suggesting that his suspension after January 6, 2021, “was probably preplanned” and asserting, “Never again should a Big Tech entity working with bad actors in the corrupt Deep State aligned with the corrupt Democrat Party be allowed to deplatform a sitting President who did nothing wrong.”
• Judicial Watch President Tom Fittontweeted that though Meta has allowed Trump back on its platforms, “he will face abusive restrictions on his speech obviously designed to help Left, Democrats and Joe Biden in the run-up to the presidential election. Biden admin involved in this censorship?”

• On the January 25 edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox contributor **Josh Kraushaar** suggested that Meta’s move to reinstate Trump “was an obvious decision, it was almost an overdue decision to not pick sides in the 2024 presidential campaign.”
• On January 26, conservative commentator Larry Elder tweeted:

• On the January 26 edition of The Benny Show, host Benny Johnsonalso asserted that Meta made the wrong decision in banning Trump two years ago because he “did not foment any type of — you can go back and look at the actual post. Donald Trump says don't riot, be peaceful, don't attack police, Donald Trump — none of this stuff. It was all — this was all manufactured.” Johnson also called the reinstatement a “very, very good thing.”
• Right-wing Facebook users also pushed conspiratorial narratives, claimingFacebook had reinstated Trump only after it succeeded in getting Biden elected and even calling for Trump to retaliate:

[twt]

===

1 23 fresh air purple team  FB key in j6?

cal sil vly pass?

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151360750/social-medias-role-in-jan-6-was-left-out-of-the-final-report

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I am Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday that both platforms will restore the accounts of former President Donald Trump, ending a two-year suspension that began after the assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The congressional committee that investigated the January 6 riot spent considerable effort looking into the role of social media in assembling the mob and fueling the violence. But very little of their evidence and findings made it into the committee's 800-page final report.

Our guest today, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, is part of a team of reporters who brought those findings into the public sphere. They wrote an article about a 122-page memo investigators circulated among the committee based on their interviews with employees of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tech platforms as well as other research. They found that tech companies failed to act on their own employees' warnings about violent rhetoric growing on their platforms in part out of reluctance to penalize conservatives, particularly then-President Trump. Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Post. He was part of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Before he joined the Post in 2014, he worked for the Tampa Bay Times.

...

HARWELL: Yeah, we had a story on January 5 that was all about just the volume of rage you could see on these sites. It was not hidden at all. It was very overt. It was very direct. It was, you know, maps of the U.S. Capitol. It was bridges into D.C., where people suspected there would be police checkpoints. It was strategies on how to sneak firearms into D.C., where they are banned. It was really a road map for literally what we saw happen on January 6. And we had been following disinformation around the election for months. And you could tell that on that day, it had really reached a fever pitch. I mean, there was clear mobilization.

And so the question at the time was, what's going on with these companies that we can see this in plain sight? Shouldn't there be something more robust to tackle these very direct calls for violence and threats and lies about the election being stolen? And at the moment, we didn't really know how bad it was inside of these companies. But, you know, now we get a sense of there was a real, clear failure here - not just political, but from these companies that really run the backbone of how we all communicate with each other.

DAVIES: In a general way, how much effort went into looking into the role of social media companiesby the staff of the January 6 Committee? I mean, do you have any general sense of - I don't know - how many interviews, what kind of documents? How much effort went into looking into this?

HARWELL: A lot. I mean, in the committee, there were multiple teams approaching this question from different angles. There was a - specifically a purple team that focused on social media and its role in the violence. And they were experts, political staffers, smart people who were part of this committee. And they sifted through tens of thousands of documents from more than a dozen of these big tech companies. They interviewed executives, former employees. They assessed thousands of Twitter messages from Trump and his supporters and many other people. They had subpoena power, so they could really get information.

I mean, they - we have rarely seen a federal body with this kind of people power and resources look into social media. And, you know, you understand why because this was a massive event in American history. And so when they started out, they really had a big concentration of power here looking at this problem. And you could see that in this hundred-page memo, they really focused on this problem very, very specifically and very concretely. And they had a lot of material to back it up.

DAVIES: Right. Which raises another question - why didn't this get more attention in the final report?

HARWELL: Yeah, so that was what we were really kind of interested in. When the final report came out late last year, the material that the purple team had uncovered was almost totally absent. You know, there was this 800-page final report that really didn't dig into social media as an entity in this problem. It was very focused on Trump and his orbit, which were important. But the purple team was dismayed at how much was left on the cutting room floor. And so that was kind of what we wanted to find out when we did our reporting.

And from, you know, a number of interviews with people who were sort of close to this process and understood, their takeaway was that some of this was shaped by political sensibilities, right? You had people on this committee who were reluctant to make this a battle with the tech companies. They didn't want to get in this tit for tat with these very important American firms. And some of those people were congresspeople with jurisdictions in California close to Silicon Valley. So that was a factor of it. There was also some worry from these committee members that they didn't want to distract from Trump.They wanted to keep this really tightly focused on Trump because they worried about the message getting diluted.

But, you know, one other factor in this was that focusing too much on social media cast an inconvenient glimpse at not just far-right QAnon people, who were very conspiratorial, but also the Republican Party itself and its role in tolerating this kind of chatter online from Trump and Americans at large. So there was a worry that, you know, digging in too much on these issues was going to reflect poorly on, you know, Republicans as a party. And so the result of that was the report ended up being a bit watered down. And a lot of this incisive material about social media, which is really important in everybody's lives not just on this day but every day, just was left out.

DAVIES: You know, it's interesting. On that particular point, I do recall, you know, the co-chair, Liz Cheney, the Republican, sharply condemning her Republican colleagues who, as she put it, were defending the indefensible. You think there was still some sensitivity on not holding Republicans to account for their complicity in the social media end of this?

...

davies: ...

You know, it's interesting. There was some mention in the public hearings of the committee in July of Twitter. They played testimony from a former Twitter employee saying that the platform had given Donald Trump special treatment. The employee was anonymous at the time. It was audio, not video, and in fact, the voice was distorted to protect the employee's identity. You later interviewed this employee on the record, right? You want to tell us a bit about her?

HARWELL: Yeah, that's right. Her name is Anika Collier Navaroli. She worked forTwitter for several years, including on the day of January 6 and before. And her role was as a legal expert on the safety policy team helping Twitter craft rules for how to approach content, protect the free speech of what people were talking about, but also take down calls to violence, set up clear red lines against extremism, and just play this kind of middle role of trying to protect the platform. So she had a really interesting view on this, and, you know, she had seen the company approach geopolitical issues all the time, right? Riots and political unrest. How do we approach this? How do we allow - what do we allow in terms of protest language that doesn't go too far over the edge?

So she was cognizant of these things and her feeling as the election became this moment where Trump was saying that the vote had been stolen - she had been seeing Twitter really erupt with a lot of people kind of mobilizing their messaging, going from just sort of vague anger to real clear directions of where they were going to go, what they were going to do, and how much they felt like Donald Trump was talking to them. You know, this whole stand by, you know, call that he gave for the Proud Boys. So, you know, she, inside the company, was pushing them - and not just her, but others, too, pushing the company to enact some new rules that would just take a tougher stance on this. One of these was a policy - she called it coded incitement to violence. So incitement to violence is not allowed on Twitter, but you can sort of code it a little bit - right? - and this is what people were doing. They were saying, I'm locked and loaded, but not specifically say where they were going. And yet, you know, by the context of it, it was pretty clear.

So she could see there was starting to be more talk of bringing guns, more talk of really sowing this anger against the federal government, and she was pushing the company to do more. And, you know, what she told the committee, and what others ended up telling the committee as well, was that Twitter was really resistant to any kind of rule that could have helped on January 6th. I mean, they passed some policies, but the company employees who spoke to the committee felt like it was just clearly not enough, and they felt like some of what happened on January 6th was really inflamed by the company's lack of action and reluctance to delve into these issues and to, really, even hold former President Trump to account for what he was saying on Twitter as well.

DAVIES: Right. Of course, Trump loved Twitter. I mean, he did tens of thousands of tweets over the years. Was Twitter's management motivated in part, according to these employees, by them enjoying the spotlight, enjoying being Donald Trump's chosen social media vehicle?

HARWELL: Yeah, 100%. I think that was the most stunning claim she made, and that was one that was a real headline from one of the committee hearings, which was that Twitter, in her words, protected Trump because he was a star.You know, he had brought a large amount of attention and clout to Twitter. Twitter in social media is effectively an also-ran, right? They're not a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok. They're a news platform, and Donald Trump helped make Twitter into a very influential company. And so in her words, she felt like the company had become deferent to Trump because they felt like they couldn't punish somebody who was beneficial in this way. There was kind of a mutually beneficial arrangement here.

But there were other people who spoke to the company, too, from inside Twitter that also suggested that there was some fear of the backlash of being too tough on Trump. And, you know, even before January 6, Trump had always been very infamous for what he would say on Twitter, as anybody who was online during those years knew. I mean, it was a lot of borderline or over-the-line tweets that people were wondering, why is Donald Trump able to talk like this on the platform? Anybody else who was sharing these kinds of messages would be treated differently, and this is what Anika ended up saying to the committee - was that he was treated differently. He was given special treatment because of this impactful role he had in the company....

:{:{}:

}:

You know, I will say Facebook had stood up some election integrity efforts even before January 6 that were about, you know, if somebody posts something about the election being stolen, we're going to post a disclaimer that actually that's false. We're going to link you to proactive, right, accurate information. Facebook had very notably disbanded those efforts before January 6. I think they sort of felt like the election's over; we're not needed anymore. That was specifically called out as an institutional failure that could have led to some of these things. But it all sort of came back to, could the company have done more, taken down more, been more active in addressing these calls to violence? And would that have made any difference on January 6?

DAVIES: There was also mention in this memo that you and your colleagues found of a white list that Facebookkept of certain accounts that were exempted from the fact-checking that would occur on other accounts. Among the people on that list -Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, various other conservative things. Did the committee find that troubling, the committee's investigators?

HARWELL: Yeah, they did. I mean, this was clearly special treatment for very high-profile people with big audiences who were known for saying things that would otherwise be fact-checked. Yeah, this was an issue because here was Facebook making a technically defensive position that would help the company, but that would actually contribute to a lot more lies and misinformation being spread to general users. So yeah, there was a feeling that this was a secret list that was not shared with the general public that was not just damaging their experience, but actively fostering these false narratives that, you know, many of which became pretty central to January 6. And there was a frustration that these elite provocateurs were getting to play by a different set of rules than anybody else.

DAVIES: And what, if anything, did Facebook executives say in defense of this to the committee?

HARWELL: Their argument was that this is a way to streamline the moderation process, right? These are people who - anything they say that becomes a controversy for Facebook, they want to handle at a high level and treat them with a different pair of gloves than people like you and me. I mean, you know, Facebook's argument in some of this is that these are people who will be targeted for, you know, mass reporting or, you know, will just sort of be at the center of a lot of kind of mucky battles. So they want to have a bigger, sort of different level of special treatment for these folks.

But, you know, I think what it ends up being is that these people can break rules, push the boundaries without penalty or consequence. And you certainly saw this with Donald Trump on Twitter where his profile cannot not even be accessed in the same way as anybody. He was constantly, no matter what he said, he was on zero strikes forever. And there was nothing he could say that would really push him over the line until we actually saw January 6. So this was a clear sort of technical measure that had become really problematic for the committee and for the general public...

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Drew Harwell. He is a reporter for The Washington Post and was part of a team that wrote recently about investigative material developed by the staff of the January 6 Committee that didn't make it into the committee's final report that dealt with how social media platforms failed to address online extremism and threats of violence in the weeks that led up to the January 6 assault.

The investigators were pretty thorough about this. They also looked at YouTube, found certainly some failings in their efforts to restrict content. YouTube was very influential. And they also looked at less-well-known platforms and sites, you know, Reddit and Tik-Tok. And some of these - in addition, some of these alt tech and really fringe sites, you know, Parler and Gab and 8kun, some of these things that were really places, I gather, where participants in the January 6 assault were really communicating directly about their intentions and plans, right?

...

HARWELL: Yeah, it is difficult. You know, I think when this process began, people were hoping that this final report would give us some clarity with, you know, the imprimatur of the federal government saying let's pass new regulations to require either no auditing and transparency of these companies or to threaten punishment against social media executives when you see failures like this happen again. You don't see any of those policy recommendations in the report. You see the committee effectively telling the companies to do a better job in policing themselves. And, you know, that goes back to what some of the committee folks were telling us, which was that this was a missed opportunity. Here was a chance for the federal government to say social media is a critical part of Americans' lives. And we want to set a framework for the productive use of it and keep people safe. But instead, the conclusions ended up really being a reflection of just how little ground we've made on this issue, which is a complicated issue, but is still one that is really important to us. So I think people came away from it with a lot more questions than answers.

DAVIES: You know, it's been alleged by conservatives for quite some time that social media are biased against them and that you can see that in their decisions. The investigators did test that in some cases, didn't they, I mean, to see whether that was generally true with some of the larger social media platforms? What did they find?

HARWELL: Yeah, what they found was really contradictory to that point. I mean, and that point has been something that Elon Musk was sharing in the Twitter files that has been the main cause celebre of Republicans in Washington, which is that Silicon Valley is a bunch of Californian techies who are against us and are tearing us down. They're using social media to silence and censor us. And it's unfair, you know? And the committee tested that. And from the many interviews and the many thousands of pages of documents, I mean, what they found was, really, the opposite. I mean, people like Donald Trump, viewpoints like stop the steal, were given a huge amount of leeway.

I mean, in Trump's case, he effectively was not punished for saying the same sort of things that would have knocked anybody else off the platform. He was really treated in a special way so as to keep his account on Twitter for years. And, you know, so he was really - instead of being sort of unfairly censored, he was elevated and promoted, which was, you know, totally the opposite of what people were conveying in the Twitter files. And so I think that was one big surprise from this whole investigation, which was that, really, these Twitter employees were worried that Twitter had not gone far enough and that some of that silence or reluctance to be more aggressive had contributed to what we ended up seeing happen at the Capitol.

DAVIES: Well, Drew Harwell, thanks so much for speaking with us.

===

mma 1 23 no vid

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/meta-fox-news-and-collapse-anti-january-6-consensus

Meta’s Wednesday announcement that it plans to let former President Donald Trump back on the Facebook account he used to encourage the January 6 insurrection is perhaps the final sign that the right’s propagandists have demolished the consensus that the Trumpist riot at the U.S. Capitol was a horrific event and that there should be accountability to prevent it from happening again.

It seemed for a brief period after the smoke cleared from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that America’s sclerotic and oft-maligned institutions might bestir themselves to rise to the defense of the nation’s democratic principles. 

In government, Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — even Trumpist lickspittles like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — vocally denounced the former president’s actions, with some of the party’s governors going so far as to call for him to leave office. 

In corporate America, a flood of blue-chip companies announced that they would terminate or suspend donations to the Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the electoral votes of one or more states. Even staid trade groups like the National Manufacturers Association condemned the mob and Trump’s role in fomenting it. 

In the press, journalists contemplated whether it might be appropriate to refuse TV airtime to Republican members of Congress who had encouraged the insurrectionists by denying the election results.

And in social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter recognized the role they had played in helping Trump stoke his supporters’ ire and the devastating consequences thereof, and cut the former president and some of his most incendiary allies off from their accounts.

But Fox News and its allies on the right quickly went to work unraveling that fragile consensus. They successfully convinced the GOP to adopt the narrative that criticisms of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election through lies, subversion, and finally mob violence had been overblown, and in fact that Republicans had been the real victims of Democratic overreach. 

The very night of the mob attack, Fox’s stars began validating the actions of the Trumpist mob, minimizing the violence and suggesting that leftist infiltrators might have been to blame. In the weeks that followed, they downplayed the former president’s responsibility for the mob’s actions; concocted an alternate reality in which the actions of a relatively sedate crowd were being used by sinister Democrats as a pretext to punish average Republicans; and mocked the law enforcement officials who were assaulted during the attack and denounced the Democrats and Republicans who took their reports seriously. 

In service of their duplicitous narrative, they lifted up from kooks and internet fever swamps false-flag conspiracy theories that the federal government was behind the attack; valorized the “patriots” jailed for their alleged participation; and shielded their viewers from contrary evidence.

This treatment of the attack by Fox and other right-wing media outlets helped create a sea change within the Republican Party. As the GOP’s volatile commentators whipped up its base, party leaders swiftly determined that there was no political future in standing firmly against Trump and the mob he had encouraged. Some backed off their prior condemnations while others who remained vocally against Trump’s attempt to unlawfully retain power were purged. The House GOP swelled its ranks in the 2022 midterms with even more election deniers; they are a power center that its leadership courts and rewards with slots on key committees.

With only one of the nation’s two major political parties willing to forthrightly oppose the attempted coup, insurrection became a partisan issue and the national consensus collapsed. Major companies abandoned their promises not to fund the campaigns of election deniers, who also found themselves invited back to major national TV news programs. And after right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he lifted Trump’s ban. 

And now Trump will be back on Facebook, too. This is a manifestly terrible idea with dire potential consequences – Trump used Facebook to fuel the bigotry and violence of his hardcore supporters and channel support for the insurrection; he has shown no remorse whatsoever for his actions and in fact still claims the election was rigged against him; and he has spent his suspension from mainstream platforms using his own Truth Social to push virulent election denial and violent QAnon conspiracy theories. In allowing him back on their platform, Meta executives are making themselves responsible for any effort Trump makes to generate another January 6.

But without a national consensus that there is a public interest in preventing a recurrence of Trumpist violence, Meta’s pecuniary and political interests returned to the fore. Facebook’s user growth has stalled out, helping to send its parent company into a spiral. Trump’s return to the platform might give it a boost; so might the return of his campaign’s massive ad spending as the 2024 presidential election heats up (Trump’s personal page is the largest buyer of Facebook political ads since 2018, spending more than $113 million). And Meta’s leadership likely hoped to avoid a contentious public hearing about why the former president was not welcome on Facebook, since “we don’t want him to use it to promote a coup” was apparently no longer an effective response with insurrectionist Republicans running the House. 

Fox and the broader right-wing information ecosystem manufactured dissent, helping to keep the GOP on the side of Trump and his insurrectionists and grinding away at the political consensus against the storming of the Capitol. As long as the Republican Party remains trapped within its bubble, the American public will have to reckon with the influence of these bomb-throwing propagandists.

---

mma 1 23

meta is allowing disgraced former President Donald Trump to return to its platforms, ignoring his continued “risk to public safety,” which is the bar the company set for his return. Meta’s decision is a green light for Trump to promote harmful content on its platforms, and it shows that the company still prioritizes profit — and appeasement of right-wing figures — over public safety.

On January 25, Meta announced that it “will be ending the suspension of Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks.” Meta suspended Trump from posting on its platforms more than two years ago, publicly citing his use of Facebook “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.” Meta has decided that “the risk to public safety,” which it set out as the measure for ending his ban, has “sufficiently receded” — a flawed assessment that gives Trump access to a platform with billions of global users.

Meta’s decision comes after Trump petitioned Meta to reinstate his accounts on January 17, and after Twitter CEO Elon Musk reinstated him on November 19. Trump has not yet posted on his reinstated Twitter account but is reportedly preparing to return to both Facebook and Twitter, and he doesn’t want to re-up his exclusivity agreement with his social media company, Truth Social.

Since starting to actively post on Truth Social in April — while suspended from most mainstream social media platforms — Trump has repeatedly pushed election misinformation and amplified the QAnon conspiracy theory:

• In October, Media Matters analyzed Trump’s posts on Truth Social and found at least 58 mentions of the word “rigged” in at least 55 posts, and at least 255 mentions of the word “election” in at least 195 posts.
• Additionally, Media Matters found that nearly half of Trump's posts on Truth Social in the week after the 2022 midterm election pushed election misinformation, including baseless falsehoods about mail-in ballots and voting machines, or amplified QAnon-promoting accounts.
• As of January 25, Trump has amplified QAnon-promoting accounts more than 400 times, far outpacing the pace of his QAnon account amplifications when he used Twitter. Notably, Trump has amplified explicit QAnon content, including with QAnon imagery and video.

Trump’s current activity on Truth Social mirrors the behavior on Facebook that resulted in his suspension, as he often flouted content moderation policies by posting misinformation, promoting extremism, and even posting incitements of violence. For instance, Trump repeatedly posted claims of voter fraud, which violated numerous Facebook policies. In a study of all of Trump’s Facebook posts between January 1, 2020, and January 6, 2021, when he was suspended, Media Matters found that roughly a quarter of the posts contained COVID-19 misinformation, election lies, or extreme rhetoric about his critics. 

Trump also repeatedly abused his ad privileges, running hundreds of ads fundraising off of voter fraud falsehoods, pushing COVID-19 misinformation in ads, and sharing a Nazi symbol nearly 100 times in his advertisements. Despite his suspension and previous abuses of ad privileges, Meta allowed Trump to continue to advertise through his joint fundraising committee, and some of these ads contained election misinformation about the 2020 election, including claims that it was “tainted” and implying that Trump is “the true president.” 

Media Matters has documented that the fundraising committee spent hundreds of thousands on Meta ads during the suspension despite limitations to his advertising, which reportedly made fundraising more difficult for Trump’s campaign. After the midterms and when he announced his 2024 presidential candidacy, the Trump campaign’s online ad spending seemingly shifted from Meta’s platforms to Google. By lifting Trump’s suspension, and subsequently removing limits on advertising, Meta will likely generate more profit — at a time when the company has been losing money. 

Meta has long prioritized profit and public image over user safety, while also capitulating to and giving preferential treatment to right-wing politicians who continue to push false claims of systemic bias against conservatives online. Allowing Trump back on is just the latest example of this harmful pattern.

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fb and twt?

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/if-meta-decides-allow-trump-back-its-platforms-it-will-be-putting-profits-ahead-users

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an comm dr 1 23

Both alarm and concern were expressed Saturday in response to new reporting about a charitable group with close ties to the U.S. Supreme Court that has been soliciting and accepting donations from corporate interests and far-right activists with cases before the Court.

The New York Times exposé focused on the activities and fundraising of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a nonprofit that claims its mission is "dedicated to the collection and preservation" of the Court's history.

While the group refused to disclose its donors to the Times, reporters from the newspaper determine that much of the funding came from powerful companies like Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, and Facebook as well as anti-abortion activists like Rev. Rob Schenck.

According to the newspaper:

:{:{The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors—and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.}:

At least $6.4 million—or 60 percent—came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.}:

In the case of Chevron, the oil giant actively gave to the society even as it had a pending climate litigation working its way through the court.

In response to the new revelations, public interest attorney Steven Donzinger, who was himself targeted by Chevron for his work aimed at holding the company to account for its polluting activities in Ecuador, said the implications were "horrifying."

"Why are these conflicts allowed?" asked Donzinger.

Others quoted by the Times said the effort by people like Rev. Schenck, who admits to using the charitable group as a way to get other anti-abortion activists closer to the justices, creates a clear conflict of interest.

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who once served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration and counts himself a donor to the Historical Society, told the newspaper was so "horrified" by Schenck's behavior that he may no longer give.

"It's disgusting," Fried said. "Many of the people who contribute have the same reasons I do. You go to a cocktail party and support a good cause. But it turns out that for some people it's not that innocent."

While the Times notes that the Historical Society is "ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government," the reality is that "the two are inextricably intertwined," with court justices serving as chair of the board and hosting gala events where exclusive access is reportedly part of the allure.

The left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the reporting raises "significant questions" about the group which has "raked in millions—a significant chunk of it from groups with cases before the Court" over the last two decades.

Fix the Court, which acts as a watchdog organization for the U.S. Supreme Court, said the justification for the Historical Society's existence just doesn't hold water.

and Gabe Roth, the group's executive director, told the Times that if money was an issue for funding such a project it would be the best solution—one free of ethical concerns—for Congress to simply appropriate the money needed to maintain the history of the Court.

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11/15 announces, stephen schwarzman hard no

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

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/meta-tiktok-stop-the-steal/

no lnk twt

Meta and TikTok busted for 'actively pushing' 'Stop the Steal 2.0' on eve of Brazil's presidential election

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams October 30, 2022

As Brazilians prepare to vote in Sunday's decisive presidential runoff, a report published Saturday revealed that social media giants Meta—Facebook's parent company—and TikTok are driving traffic to content promoting a military coup to overthrow Brazil's democracy.

The report—entitled Stop the Steal 2.0: How Meta and TikTok Are Promoting a Coup—was published by the San Francisco-based activist group SumOfUs and asserts that "on the eve of the second vote in Brazil's most important election in decades, Meta and TikTok continue to put the integrity of the election on the line through their disastrous recommendation systems."

The publication comes ahead of Sunday's second-round contest between far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro—who has said he may not accept the outcome of the election if he loses–and former leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Aggregate polling showed the two candidates in a statistical dead heat on Friday.

According to the new report:

Meta claims that Brazil is a priority region and that the company is committed to enforcing policies and practices that uphold the integrity of the vote. But not only does SumOfUs' previous research show that the platforms are awash with conspiracy theories about the election, claims of electoral fraud, and calls for a military coup, this research report sets out how Facebook's recommender systems are actively pushing users towards this content.

:{:{}:

}:

Far-right extremists, who are openly agitating for a military coup, are operating freely on Meta's platforms, and Meta is not only allowing them to spread their message and recruit new members, but the platform's algorithms are prioritizing anti-democratic groups, accounts, and posts. The report also looked at the role TikTok is playing in tackling the growing problem of election disinformation on its platform, and found its moderation lacking...

The findings confirm civil society organizations' worst fears, that platforms like Facebook and Instagram are enabling bad actors to organize and recruit new members, just as it did in the U.S. 2020 elections, which ended in violent insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

"At this point, it is safe to say that Meta has become Bolsonaro's official disinformation machine," SumOfUs campaign director Flora Rebello Arduini said in a statement. "This is not Meta's first time wreaking havoc on democracy and Brazilians deserve better from this multi-billion dollar company."

"As this report shows," she added, "TikTok needs to up its game and not follow Meta's lead in fueling the disinformation crisis in Brazil."

On Saturday evening, SumOfUs activists projected an image of Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg setting the Brazilian flag alight with the message "Meta is destroying Brazilian democracy" at Kings Cross tube station in London, just around the corner from Meta's U.K. headquarters.

The new report comes amid warnings and acts of right-wing political violence. While no motive has yet been announced, on Friday local São Paulo-area politician Reginaldo Camilo dos Santos, a prominent supporter of da Silva and the left-wing Workers' Party running for Congress, was assassinated in a drive-by shooting near his home in Jandira.

Agência Pública, an independent Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, reported earlier this month that from August 16 and the end of the first round on October 2, there wereat least 148 cases of electoral violence across the country.

A separate report published last week by the anti-corruption and human rights organization Global Witness revealed that YouTube approved 100% of Brazilian election misinformation ads submitted for approval, while Facebook accepted around half of such submissions.

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mma 10 22

New data shows Google is earning revenue directing traffic to fringe right-wing platforms and websites

Google is responsible for nearly half of U.S. display ad traffic used by fringe social media platforms to drive traffic and new users to their extremism-filled sites

WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY

PUBLISHED 10/21/22

New analysis provides some insight into the extent to which far-right social media platforms — such as Truth Social, Gab, Parler, Gettr, and Rumble — use Google’s enormous advertising network to expand their audience. In the past 12 months, these fringe platforms have spent roughly $258,000 on ad networks including Google, likely just a fraction of their full spend and a sum that Google’s $210 billion advertising business could surely do without.

Media Matters and others have reported on Google’s history of letting far-right actors monetize extremism, such as helping the monetization of racist and dangerous anti-Muslim articles from the fake news website Freedom Daily, allowing anti-abortion centers to target women with misleading and unlabeled ads, and letting former Trump aide Steve Bannon monetize his website even as he was banned on Google-owned YouTube.

This week, Media Matters reported that a Dewey Square analysis of data from traffic analytics company Similarweb found that Google’s ad network is driving traffic and new users to fringe video-sharing platform Rumble, while also monetizing some of its traffic. Notably, Rumble had 622 million U.S. visits in the last year (from October 2021 through September 2022), and nearly 48% of U.S. display ad traffic driving users to Rumble during that time came from Google Display Network ads.

Additional analysis from Dewey found that Google is similarly generating revenue from other fringe platforms and far-right websites that are filled with extremism. In fact, Google’s ad network promotes traffic to multiple fringe platforms, monetizes visits to the platforms with ads to third-party sites including far-right websites, and then monetizes visits to those websites with ads to other sites.

Google’s ad network generates revenue and promotes traffic to these alternative far-right social media platforms grx]

In addition to Rumble, Dewey’s analysis found that Truth Social, Gettr, Gab, and Parler — fringe platforms that boast minimal content moderation policies and allow hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories — had over 124 million U.S. visits combined in the last year (from October 2021 through September 2022).

Google’s ad network is responsible for some of the traffic to the fringe platforms. In the last year, more than 46% of U.S. display ad traffic driving users to these fringe platforms came from Google Display Network ads. Of this traffic, 63% went to Rumble and 20% went to Gettr, while another 11% went to Gab, and 6% went to Parler.

Dewey traced the estimated sums of money that Gettr, Parler, Gab, and Rumble spent on U.S.-based advertising over the last year and found that they spent at least $397,000 and earned at least 108 million ad impressions combined. More than 65% of this advertising spend, or over $258,000, was through ad networks, including Google.

Here is an example of display ads used to drive new traffic to the fringe platforms:

fringe platforms' google ads

Far-right platforms use Google’s ad network to monetize traffic

While some of the platforms do try to earn revenue by selling merchandise or offering paid account upgrades, advertising monetization is another source of income.

Dewey’s analysis found over 246,000 U.S. display ad visits monetizing the fringe platforms in the last year (from October 2021 through September 2022). Of these visits, Google Display Network made up more than 65%, with 220 advertisers using the network.

:{:{}:

}:

These advertisers on fringe platforms using Google Display Network include right-wing media outlets, such as Washington Examiner and The Epoch Times, and right-wing websites, such as the American Center for Law & Justice, Republican fundraising website WinRed, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (Notably, Dewey found that the NRSC was the largest advertiser on Rumble over this last year, spending over $577,000 on ads on the platform.) These right-wing sites also used Google’s display ad network to monetize their sites.

Additionally, these large companies are advertising on fringe platforms through Google’s ad network:

Amazon

Lending Tree

Chevrolet

Subaru

Walmart

Ancestry.com

:{:{}:

}:

Google is providing a valuable source of revenue to these still relatively small and fringe far-right social media platforms that are allowing the spread of harmful content and extremism. They need Google far more than Google needs them.

Related

Google’s ad network is driving and monetizing traffic to the fringe video-sharing platform Rumble

10/20/22 6:28 PM EDT

Google Play approved the Truth Social app, even though nothing has changed since it was initially rejected

10/17/22 1:43 PM EDT

Parler promised Apple and Google it would change, but harmful content still plagues the platform

10/18/22 3:58 PM EDT

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/lauren-boebert-facebook-silencing-conservatives/

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https://theintercept.com/2022/10/01/roe-amazon-google-facebook-independent-womens-forum/

WHEN THE Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the country’s top internet companies quickly responded with commitments to help employees in states that moved to ban abortion. In an implicit signal of support for abortion rights, the companies said they would help those employees seek abortions in states where the procedure remains legal.

In the years leading up to the seismic reproductive rights decision, however, the tech giants sponsored a controversial group that’s worked tirelessly to put the Supreme Court under conservative control, setting the stage for Roe’s reversal.

The Independent Women’s Forum traces its origins back to the 1991 fight to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. Since then, the group has expanded into promoting a litany of perennial right-wing causes like climate denial, immigration alarmism, and deregulation, but a conservative-dominated Supreme Court remained a focus.

public relations plays a key role in its operation. With savvy self-branding as a pro-woman organization, the group fought for the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. The IWF couched support for Brett Kavanaugh as good feminism and any opposition to Amy Coney Barrett as sexism — despite well-founded concerns that their ascensions to the court would spell the end of Roe. The IWF wields a skillful mix of media placement, op-eds, television punditry, and other contributions to the conservative content ecosystem.

The group also takes advantage of quieter influence peddling as well. In 2020, IWF chief and Vicks VapoRub heiress Heather Higgins boasted to a closed audience of Virginia conservatives about how instrumental the group was in rallying congressional support for Kavanaugh’s nomination. Higgins told the group that the IWF circulated a confidential strategy memo on the Hill. “Most important,” Higgins said, “Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” referring to the Republican senator from Maine.

Related

The Dark Money-Funded Women’s Group Rallying Behind Amy Coney Barrett

Independent Women’s Forum and its sister organization, Independent Women’s Voice, draw on donations from right-wing financial mainstays like the Koch brothers, but in recent years the groups have enjoyed financial support from Facebook’s parent company, Meta; Google; and Amazon. In 2017, Google sponsored an IWF gala at the “gold” donor level, according to brochures provided to The Intercept by True North Research, a progressive watchdog group. Other brochures show that Meta (which at the time still using the name Facebook) sponsored IWF galas in 2018, alongside Google, and 2019. Honorees at IWF events have included notable anti-abortion figures like Rep. Lynne Cheney, R-Wy.; top Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway; and Vice President Mike Pence.

Corporate disclosures from Amazon show that the company donated undisclosed sums to the IWF in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Amazon, Google, Meta, and the IWF did not respond to a request for comment.

True North founder Lisa Graves characterized the IWF’s efforts as an attempt to launder conservative ideology. “They act as a distaff,” she said in an interview, “in essence providing a woman’s face for the right wing’s critique or attack on progressives and its advance of this extreme and regressive, repressive agenda.”

DESPITE THE PUBLIC perception of Silicon Valley’s alignment with progressive values and liberal causes, tech companies, particularly those fearing state regulation, have long funneled money to right-wing groups like the IWF. At the same time, the IWF routinely pushes policy positions that are highly favorable to its corporate donors.

The IWF has consistently espoused tech industry-friendly positions on labor, antitrust, and other issues, without disclosing its donors’ interests. Take, for example, an April IWF blog post that warned that antitrust enforcement against Big Tech would prove disastrous. “Tech innovation has been nothing short of miraculous over the past few decades,” wrote Patrice Onwuka,director of IWF’s Center for Economic Opportunity and its go-to defender of powerful tech firms.

:{:{       Read Our Complete Coverage:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal;display:block;letter-spacing:0px;margin-bottom:5px;text-transform:capitalize"):}::{The End of Roe:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:block"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;width:420px;float:left;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;max-width:420px"):}:

Few issues in tech have galvanized the IWF and Onwuka like the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would block tech companies from leveraging their enormous reach to favor their own services over competitors. In a December 2021 piece titled “Amazon Prime may not be around to save the day next Christmas,” Onwuka claimed, “Senator Amy Klobuchar and others are on a path to end services like Prime’s fast and free shipping and other services that we depend upon.” Onwuka then linked to a blog post by the Amazon-funded Chamber of Progress that claimed, dubiously, that the law would “ban Amazon Prime.”

In June, Onwuka wrote a jeremiad against congressional antitrust efforts:“The conveniences that make life and work easier and faster and save consumers money may disappear.” Later that day, Onwuka appeared on Fox Business, again protesting antitrust enforcement against the tech industry. “I’m more worried about the impact on small business owners and on women and families that rely on some of the benefits that some of these big four tech companies provide,” she said.

While shielding Big Tech from antitrust scrutiny has proven a priority for the IWF, the group also stands up directly for its benefactors. In 2019, Onwuka wrote an entire post dedicated sticking up for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Politico reported that he had attended dinners with notable conservative commentators and lawmakers. “Zuckerberg is a private citizen who can eat dinner with whomever he wants,” Onwuka wrote. “His dinner has a clear business purpose and that’s part of doing business.”

“Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position. But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

The cordial treatment of industry giants is of course a linchpin of conservatism, and the IWF would almost certainly be warning that antitrust will bring us back to the Bronze Age even without Google sponsoring its gala dinners. But fueling the right-wing punditry mill is a large, ever-expanding facet of Big Tech’s political strategy.

While there’s no evidence that Zuckerberg or Google CEO Sundar Pichai have any personal opposition to abortion access, their companies no doubt benefit from their support of a broad, thriving conservative discourse ecosystem in which any government regulation is anathema. For tech company leadership, the reality that this ecosystem pushes not just Facebook-friendly laissez-faire economics, but also climate denial and abortion bans is considered a perhaps unfortunate but worthwhile byproduct.

Silicon Valley’s patronage of right-wing think tanks and campaigns is an arrangement in which there is ample plausible deniability to go around. When The Guardian reported in 2019 that Google was donating to some of the nation’s most notorious climate-denial organizations, a company spokesperson retorted, “We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organizations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy.”

The multitude of topics on which the IWF engages, and its careful avoidance of publicly opposing abortion access have helped it avoid a reputation as an anti-abortion group. “Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position,” explained Graves, of True North. “But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers**/hurricane-ian-**pummeled-florida-facebook-allowed-anti-science-content-thrive

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-fox-news-weaponized-hurricane-ian-push-its-agenda-discredit-climate-science-trash

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-executive-nick-cleggs-latest-comments-suggest-trump-will-likely-be-back-platform

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/anti-vaccine-accounts-instagram-are-using-link-bio-loophole-monetize-their-content-and

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an 9 22 cmn dr no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/january-6th-all-over-again/

Trailing badly in the polls with the presidential election less than a month away, far-right Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro is attempting to galvanize his supporters with incendiary rhetoric and lies about the integrity of the vote—and Facebook is supplying him with a megaphone to do so.

That's according to a new report released Monday by SumOfUs, a global group that's been tracking Facebook's failure to combat blatant disinformation on its platform ahead of Brazil's closely watched October 2 presidential election.

The report finds that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—each owned by Meta—"are being used by Bolsonaro and his allies to push election lies and grow Brazil's own 'Stop the Steal' movement," a reference to former U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential contest.

That campaign culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and observers fear that similar or far worse violence could occur in Brazil, where Bolsonaro has indicated he may not concede defeat and hinted at a coup attempt if his leftist opponent, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, prevails.

"This is January 6th all over again—Meta is actively helping mobilize an online army in Brazil that's peddling conspiracy theories about the integrity of the election and threatening a violent coup," said Flora Rebello Arduini, campaign director for SumOfUs. "Regulators the world over need to take urgent action, or we'll only see these kinds of attacks on democracy intensify."

SumOfUs says in the new report—titled Stop the Steal 2.0: How Meta Is Subverting Brazilian Democracy—that the tech giant is "profiting directly from" Bolsonaro's attacks on Brazil's electoral process, just as it did during the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection.

During its investigation of Meta's content policies ahead of Brazil's high-stakes presidential contest, SumOfUs found:

Multiple examples of Facebook ads that break the federal government's own pre-electoral advertising rules;

An ecosystem of posts and ads echoing the far-right's cry for a violent uprising on September 7th, peddling conspiracy theories about the integrity of the election and candidates, and attacking democratic institutions and public officials; and

Surging levels of extremist rhetoric on WhatsApp and Telegram groups about staging a military coup, removing Supreme Court justices, and questioning the integrity of the electronic voting system.

Focusing specifically on large far-right rallies planned for this upcoming Wednesday—Brazil's independence day—SumOfUs found that a "relatively small sample of 16 ads related to antidemocratic rallies on September 7th... had racked up 615,000 [Facebook] impressions by 26th August 2022."

"It illustrates again Facebook's role in pumping out violent and hateful content to large numbers of users," the group said. "One ad, which was taken down before the release of this report, features a military combat knife and gear with hashtags related to the 7th September rallies. It ran during the week of August 25th... Despite the ad takedown, an almost identical post remains up on the shop page 'Military Bazar' since August 23rd. SumOfUs has reported the post."

Ads on Facebook and Instagram in Brazil

The organization also examined major group chats on WhatsApp, Meta's messaging service and the most popular social media platform in Brazil, and found abundant "pro-coup extremism."

"SumOfUs researchers monitored three WhatsApp groups between August 20-26th and were bombarded with messages about the September 7th rallies," the report notes. "One post compared the protests to Tahrir Square, citing the 18-day protest in Egypt in 2011 which ended in the overthrow of the government."

Arduini argued the new research makes clear that "Meta has learned absolutely nothing since January 6 in the U.S."

"We are seeing ads that are pushing not just for a violent coup in the country, but also narratives discrediting the electoral processes in Brazil," Arduini told TIME.

In order to "change course and prevent a repeat of January 6 in Brazil and beyond," SumOfUs is urging Meta to strengthen its policies by:

Beefing up its content moderation systems, including by hiring more content moderators with sufficient understanding of the local political context; and providing them with fair pay and decent working conditions;

Improving its ad account verification process so as to more effectively filter out accounts posting content that undermines the integrity of elections;

Assessing, mitigating, and publishing the risks posed by their platforms to human rights in the countries in which they operate;

Publishing details of the steps they've taken in each country and in each language to ensure election integrity;

Increasing transparency by listing full details of all ads in the Meta ad library, including intended target audience, actual audience, ad spend, and ad buyer;

Allowing verified independent third-party auditors to check whether the company is doing what it is saying, and to ensure it can be held accountable;

Publishing its pre-election risk assessment for Brazil; and

Responding to the 90+ Brazilian civil society organizations' policy recommendations in their report The Role of Digital Platforms in Protecting Electoral Integrity in the 2022 Brazilian Election.

"With tens of thousands expected to join anti-democracy marches in Brazil on September 7th, and Bolsonaro and his allies stoking support for an armed coup online, it is clear we are now at a crunch point," SumOfUs said. "Meta is failing to live up to its promises of protecting electoral integrity in Brazil."

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got rid of like and follow?

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-considers-eliminating-its-covid-19-misinformation-policies-even-dangerous-content

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town hall

8 22 bs

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

Sarah ArnoldSarah Arnold|Posted: Aug 28, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

:{:{}:

}:

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

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

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

twt

chuck g

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

Recommended

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

Matt Vespa

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

:{:{}:

}:

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

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/rfk-jr-nonprofit-facebook-instagram/

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mma 7 22 west va v epA

...

• ## Out of the top 10 posts with the most interactions that Media Matters analyzed, 6 were from right-leaning Facebook pages
• These 6 posts were from Newsmax, Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, and Fox News, which had 2 posts. Out of these 6 posts, half contained industry talking points or attacked the administrative state and federal agencies that the right has villainized for enforcing lockdowns and vaccine mandates. These reactions and the sources cited in them further demonstrated the decision as a victory for the fossil fuel industry and its conservative allies which helped orchestrate this result to line their pockets and hinder progress on climate action.

Among the top examples from right-leaning pages that contained misinformation was a post from Ben Shapiro with nearly 22,000 interactions that linked to an article from the Daily Wire. The article quoted Heritage Foundation research fellow Daren Bakst, who claimed that the court had rightfully blocked the EPA from overstepping its boundaries and that only Congress can make certain regulatory decisions under the Constitution.

The Heritage Foundation has received millions of dollars in funding from Koch-connected organizations, as well as considerable funding from the fossil fuel industry, while outwardly denying the scientific consensus on climate change. The foundation has also played a major role in moving courts to the right, and even created a secretly financed program to train law clerks to elevate its views. According to The New York Times, Heritage helped the Federalist Society compile the lists of potential Supreme Court nominees from which President Donald Trump chose to appoint Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Both justices voted to stifle the EPA. However, the Daily Wire article ignored these connections between the conservative think tank, its financial backers in the fossil fuel industry, and the court’s ruling. 

The article also quoted Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who baselessly claimed that the Clean Power Plan would “lead to higher utility bills, job loss and overall increased energy prices.” While these regulations were never implemented, the plan was predicted to have cut electricity bills by 7% and deliver up to $34 billion in health benefits.

• [twt ben shapiro]
• Many of the top 10 posts, particularly those from right-leaning pages, framed the decision primarily as a victory against the EPA’s ability to enforce regulations – or what Mike Huckabee referred to, in a post that received more than 11,000 interactions, as “the reign of tyranny by unaccountable bureaucrats.” A post from Sean Hannity that garnered 14,000 interactions also linked to an article on his website describing the decision as a “blow to climate extremists” and calling to “unleash American energy.”[twt]
• The top left-leaning post, which was from historian Heather Cox Richardson and had over 61,000 interactions, provided an overview of several recent and upcoming Supreme Court decisions and pointed out that the court set a precedent in West Virginia v. EPA using legal reasoning that was even rejected by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in 2001. She also highlighted excerpts from Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent pointing out that Congress already delegates power to federal agencies to address issues where it does not have expertise.

Another popular left-leaning post about the case from former President Barack Obama,which had over 55,000 interactions, mentioned climate impacts on vulnerable populations and urged Congress to “pass President Biden’s climate and clean energy investments.” Though right-leaning posts received more engagement overall, Richardson and Obama’s posts each had twice as many interactions as the top right-wing misinformation posts.

• the top Facebook posts about the ruling from left-leaning pages, which accounted for 3 of the top 10 posts, criticized the decision while highlighting various grievances with how the court came to its decision and what impact the ruling will have on the communities being affected by the climate crisis. [twt]
• The only post about the case from an ideologically nonaligned Facebook page in the top 10 came from CNN. It received just over 12,000 interactions and linked to a fairly detailed article putting the decision in the context of urgent calls from scientists to cut emissions and transition away from fossil fuels, and citing the 2021 report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which called the climate crisis a “code red” for humanity.

Although left-leaning and nonaligned pages were vocal about the gravity of the Supreme Court’s decision, the right was was still able to co-opt much of the conversation on Facebook, shifting attention and blame away from the small group of right-wing figures and industry executives who benefit from the ruling to hamstring environmental protections in the face of the worsening climate crisis, leaving the rest of us to grapple with an uncertain future.

• none of the top 10 posts outlined how, as The New York Times puts it, the case “is the product of a coordinated, multi-year strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries.” Some only mentioned the court case in passing – for example, a popular post with more than 16,000 interactions from controversial documentarian Michael Moore referenced the case once among a host of other political grievances in a “declaration.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/lauren-boebert-facebook-silencing-conservatives/

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fail

an 6 22 pro publ

The dummied-up flyer bore the hallmarks of a real WANTED poster. A grainy photo of a woman outside an election office in the suburbs of Atlanta stamped with the word “WANTED.” An image of a sheriff’s badge and the phone number for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. The implication was clear: The woman was being sought by the local sheriff for voter fraud.

The flyer was fake, and though the sheriff’s office eventually called it out, the false poster went viral, amassing tens of thousands of shares, views and threatening comments on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok and raising fears that harm could come to the unidentified woman.

Stolen-election activists and supporters of former President Donald Trump have embraced a new tactic in their ongoing campaign to unearth supposed proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential race: chasing down a fictional breed of fraudster known as a “ballot mule” and using social media to do it.

Inspired by a conservative documentary film that has won praise from Trump and his allies — and debunking from critics including former Attorney General William Barr — self-styled citizen sleuths are posting and sharing photos of unnamed individuals and accusing them of election crimes. They are calling on their followers to help identify these “ballot mules,” who are accused of having violated laws against dropping off multiple absentee ballots during the 2020 election. A state lawmaker in Arizona has even encouraged people to act as “vigilantes” and catch future “mules.”

Promoting such false information violates the policies of Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. Facebook’s “Community Standards” says its policy is to remove content that incites harassment or violence or impersonates government officials. Twitter and TikTok have similar rules and guidelines for what can and can’t appear on their platforms.

ProPublica identified at least a dozen additional posts on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok that accuse unnamed individuals of being “ballot mules” and engaging in allegedly illegal activity. Some of these posts echo the “WANTED”-style language seen in the Gwinnett County meme, while others include similar calls to action to identify the individuals.

None of the posts reviewed by ProPublica include evidence that any of the people depicted in the posters engaged in illegal activity. Yet the social media companies have reacted slowly or not at all to such posts, some of which clearly violate their policies, experts say.

Disinformation researchers from the nonpartisan clean-government nonprofitCommon Causealerted Facebook and Twitter that the platforms were allowing users to post such incendiary claims in May. Not only did the claims lack evidence that crimes had been committed, but experts worry that poll workers, volunteers and regular voters could face unwarranted harassment or physical harm if they are wrongfully accused of illegal election activity.

So far, there is no sign that any of the people depicted have been identified or suffered any threats.

Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst with Common Cause who sent warnings to the social-media companies, says the lack of action suggests that tech companies relaxed their efforts to police election-related threats ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“This is the new playbook, and I’m worried that platforms are not prepared to deal with this tactic that encourages dangerous behavior,” Steiner said.

Spokespeople for Facebook and TikTok said they would remove posts flagged by ProPublica for violating their respective community standards policies. A Twitter spokesperson did not comment.

Thirty-one states allow a third party to collect and return an absentee ormail-in balloton behalf of another voter. These laws help voters who are disabled or infirm, live in spread-out rural areas or reside on tribal lands with limited access to polling places or ballot drop boxes. In states with a history of absentee voting, both Democratic and Republican operatives have engaged in organized ballot-collection drives.

Critics, labeling the practice “ballot harvesting,” have sought to restrict its use, warning about the potential for fraud. However, incidents of proven fraud related to ballot collection are extremely rare. A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation identifies just 238 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” since 1988. One high-profile case of fraud involving absentee ballots occurred in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race. A Republican operativeengaged in a ballot-tampering scheme involving hundreds of ballots. The state election board later threw out the election result and ordered a redo. It was likely the first federal election overturned due to fraud, according to historians and election-law experts.

The phrases “ballot mules” and “ballot trafficking” — with their intentional echoes of the language of drugs and cartels — started to gain traction online in 2021, according to Mike Caulfield, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. An analysis by Caulfield and his colleagues found that prominent Republicans including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel invoked “ballot trafficking” last spring.

But it wasn’t until conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza and a discredited conservative group called True the Vote last fall began to tease findings that would later appear in D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules” that uses of “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules” shot up, according to Caulfield’s research.

The “2000 Mules” film claims that a network of thousands of people illegally stuffed ballot boxes in swing states to steal the presidency for Joe Biden. It draws heavily on the work of True the Vote, which purported to use surveillance footage and geolocation data to make its claims of illegal ballot activity.

Numerous fact-checks of the film have cast serious doubt over its central premise. In a deposition with the Jan. 6 select committee, Barr said he found the conclusions of “2000 Mules” far from convincing. “My opinion then and my opinion now,” he said, “is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”

D’Souza and True the Vote did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite its flimsy conclusions, “2000 Mules” found an enthusiastic audience in Trump and his supporters. In early May, Trump screened the film at his Mar-a-Lago private club. The film has since earned nearly $1.5 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. In a recent 12-page letter responding to the public hearings organized by the Jan. 6 select committee, Trump cited “2000 Mules” nearly 20 times.

As the film’s dubious claims have spread online, stolen-election activists are creating and sharing online content purporting to reveal more “mules” and accusing those individuals of illegal behavior without actual evidence of wrongdoing.

The most striking example is the meme that depicts an older white woman leaving a ballot drop box in Georgia’s suburban Gwinnett County. The word “WANTED” appears above her head as does the image of a sheriff’s badge labeled “Gwinnett County” and the sheriff office’s phone number.

“Ballot mule,” the meme says. “If you can ID her, call Gwinnett Co. sheriff’s office.”

A spokeswoman for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office says the meme is fake. The sheriff’s office hasn’t received calls purporting to identify the woman. The spokeswoman said that the office was investigating who created the meme.

ProPublica was unable to identify the woman in the “WANTED” meme. A spokesman for the Gwinnett County elections office confirmed that the name tag worn by the woman in the meme matched those worn by county election workers in 2020. He also verified that the drop box in the video was located outside of the county’s election headquarters.

The origins of the woman’s photo in the “WANTED” meme appear to point back to a Georgia businessman and self-described election-fraud investigator named David Cross.

For months Cross has posted short clips of surveillance footage showing people depositing ballots at drop boxes in Gwinnett County. Cross sometimes narrates these videos and makes unverified accusations of illegal ballot harvesting. In a clip that Cross posted online on May 3, an older white woman — the same woman in the “WANTED” meme — deposits multiple ballots into the drop box outside the headquarters for Gwinnett County’s elections office. In his narration, Cross accuses the woman of depositing as many as 35 ballots, though it’s not at all clear from the video exactly how many ballots the woman deposited. “Totally illegal,” he says in the video. (Cross did not respond to requests for comment.)

Georgia law prohibits many third parties from submitting a ballot that’s not their own. However, the law makes exceptions for caregivers for the elderly and the disabled, immediate family members, members of the same household, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and more.

Cross, the Georgia activist, has filed complaints with the State Election Board and secretary of state’s office alleging illegal ballot deliveries and citing his surveillance footage clips. Last month, the State Election Board dismissed three complaints alleging “ballot harvesting” after an investigation by the secretary of state’s office found that the alleged “mules” were voters dropping off ballots for themselves and family members.

A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told ProPublica that the office has a pending investigation into the woman in the “WANTED” meme. The spokesman, Walter Jones, stressed that no one should assume that an individual shown in a video delivering multiple ballots is automatically guilty of a crime, nor would the ballots in question be invalidated even if someone had violated the state’s ballot-collection law.

The video published by Cross of the woman at the Gwinnett County drop box spread rapidly online. Twitter users accused the woman of being one of the “2000 mules” and urged their followers to “MAKE HER FAMOUS!” — in other words, reveal her identity and share it widely.

One Twitter user shared the woman’s image with the “WANTED” text and the fake Gwinnett County sheriff’s badge. “Once we find out who paid these people the whole story will become clear,” the account wrote. That tweet amassed more than 9,000 retweets and more than 14,000 likes before Twitter removed it.

The “WANTED” post spread across Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. A Facebook group called “Celebrities for Trump” shared it. “We need more if [sic] these,” the post said, referring to the WANTED sign. “Keep your eyes open. Report them all it is a crime.”

Several days after the “WANTED” flyer surfaced and reached a large audience, the Gwinnett County sheriff stated that the post was “false.” Yet despite the post impersonating a law-enforcement agency, social-media companies have been slow to remove it.

While Twitter removed dozens of posts with the “WANTED” sign, ProPublica was able to find instances of it still on the platform.

Disinformation researchers tell ProPublica that they also identified posts accusing people of being ballot mules in other states with laws that restrict third parties from submitting people’s ballots. “Mule right here in PA,” one TikTok post read. “Make this Upper Dublin resident famous #2000Mules #2000MulesDocumentary #2000MulesTheMovie.”

In Arizona, a Republican state senator named Kelly Townsend has encouraged people to camp out at ballot drop boxes and write down license plate numbers of people deemed to be suspicious. “I have been so pleased to hear of all you vigilantes that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Townsend recently said. “So, do it. Do it.”

Even if “2000 Mules” were accurate — which experts stress it almost certainly is not — the ballot-trafficking theory put forward by the film would not change the result of any election. Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, says he believes the rigged-election message in “2000 Mules” is just the latest attempt to more broadly lay the groundwork for challenging and overturning the outcome of a future election.

“If you believe the last election was stolen, you’re going to be more likely to take steps to steal the next one back,” Hasen said. “It’s pretty obvious that what’s going on here is using false claims of fraud as a potential pretext to engage in election subversion in 2024 or another future election. That’s very dangerous for American democracy.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/facebook-ad-algorithm/

Facebook pages run by state and local level Republican Parties appear to have received more exposure and engagement than the same types of pages belonging to the Democratic Party, new research finds.

On Wednesday, June 8, research was made public highlighting an apparent "gap in engagement growth 'unique to Facebook' between the GOP pages and their Democratic counterparts by 2019."

According to HuffPost, the findings also noted a distinct difference in the level of engagement for posts shared by both parties. Posts shared by local Republican Parties had “a doubling of the total shares” compared to Democratic posts.

The authors of the study also weighed in with more details about their findings.

“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted.

"The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy," they added.

Kevin Reuning, an associate professor at Miami University who also co-authored the study, took to Twitter with visual representations of their findings. With the visual, he tweeted about the "weird patterns" in the data.

"In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did," he tweeted.

[twt graf]

In response to the research data reports, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever pushed back arguing the data “'doesn’t add up' to what Facebook’s 2018 change to prioritize 'meaningful social interactions' actually did for the platform," per HuffPost.

Writing to NBC News, Lever wrote, “The trends here instead seem to coincide with a divisive election cycle, and since the differences between political parties in the U.S. have been growing for decades, the idea that a change to Facebook ranking would fundamentally shift how people choose to engage with political parties is implausible."

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-fails-apply-fact-check-labels-energy-independence-misinformation

as  the global economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, insufficient oil supply and the war in Ukraine have increased the price of crude oil, and gas prices have followed suit.On Facebook, right-wing pages are pushing a false narrative of American “energy independence” to shift the blame for high gas prices to the Biden administration and promote an ineffective, anti-science, pro-fossil fuel agenda.Misinformation on this topic is spreading on the platform, and the majority of posts go unflagged by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners.

Facebook claims to reduce the distribution of posts with climate change misinformation through its fact-checking partnerships, though it does not remove climate change misinformation posts unless they violate its Community Standards. These organizations -- certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter -- can label misinformation, and posts with such labels are apparently pushed lower in the news feed. Facebook also says that pages, groups, or accounts that repeatedly share misinformation can face penalties, such as losing the ability to advertise or monetize posts or being tagged with pop-up warnings indicating that the account often shares misinformation. However, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and numerous media accountability reports have revealed that not only is Facebook’s policy incoherent and ineffective — as many posts go unlabeled — but the platform’s algorithm also appears to push users toward climate change denial content, pages, and groups.

In our latest study, Media Matters looked at Facebook pages that consistently spread climate or energy-related misinformation from September 1, 2021, through April 1, 2022, and found these pages were overwhelmingly ideologically right-leaning. We identified the 100 top Facebook posts with the most interactions (likes, comments, shares) that contained climate change and energy-related misinformation and found many posts used the energy independence narrative to push misinformation about gas prices.

Key findings

• The top 100 Facebook posts with the most interactions (likes, comments, shares) that contain climate change and energy-related misinformation earned 5.2 million interactions.
• Only 2 posts had a misinformation fact-checking label for failing to provide context and misusing the term “energy independence.” These posts earned 176,000 interactions combined.
• Among the top 100 posts, 37 other posts made similarly false arguments about “energy independence,” yet none were labeled. These posts earned a total of 1.5 million interactions.
• High gas prices were the key driver of misinformation for 41 out of the top 100 posts. These posts accounted for 1.8 million interactions.
  • Among these, 14 posts (34%) argued for increased fossil fuel extraction, production, and infrastructure in addition to misusing the term “energy independence.”

• ## Misinformation fact-checking labels were applied to only 2 of dozens of “energy independence” posts
• For years, Fox News has used the term “energy independence” to describe a situation where the U.S. could increase domestic fossil fuel production enough to isolate itself from the volatility of oil and gas prices caused by geopolitical instability. Recent misinformation on Facebook adopts these talking points, claiming that the U.S. was previously energy independent and is now dealing with high gas prices due to the Biden administration’s policies.

In reality, the U.S. was a net exporter of energy in 2021 and produced more energy than it consumed while Biden was president, fitting a widely accepted definition of energy independence. But whether or not a country is a net exporter of energy, gas prices are shaped by global supply and demand, not the actions of a single government.

The misinformation we found on Facebook prevents users from obtaining a full understanding of this concept, especially when there is no readily available fact check that users can access. Out of the top 100 misinformation posts Media Matters examined, just 2 had fact-checking labels. These posts earned 176,000 interactions combined.

One of the posts was from the page of climate denier Franklin Graham, who has argued that humans have a God-given right to increase resource extraction.

Graham’s labeled post claims that “the United States had the strongest economy in over 70 years — and we were energy independent. Now we are dangerously dependent on other countries again — buying 7 percent of our oil from Russia.”The post earned 132,000 interactions and was the fifth-most popular post out of the 100 Media Matters looked at between September 1, 2021 and April 1, 2022.

Facebook’s label indicates that the post has missing context, specifically that it “misled on energy independence.” The fact check links to an article by Agence France-Presse, one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners.

The other post which also has a missing-context label is a video from the Facebook page Media Research Center TV. The title of the video, “Killing Keystone: How Biden and The Far Left Destroyed American Energy Independence,” is a false claim in and of itself. Media Research Center, which describes itself as a right-wing media watchdog, has long denied the scientific consensus on climate change and receives funding from the fossil fuel industry. The Facebook label on the post cites misleading information on energy independence, linking to the same AFP article. The post has 44,000 interactions....

no lnx many twt]

facebook failed to consistently label similar high-performing posts as “energy independence” misinformation

It’s clear these two posts breach Facebook’s fact-checking policy. However, our research identified 37 other posts earning 1.5 million combined interactions that made very similar statements regarding energy independence. None of these other posts were flagged with a missing-context label.

For example, on March 6, Fox News posted a graphic with a quote from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), presented as fact. The post claims that Scott claimed the Biden administration is preventing the U.S. from being energy independent because it has considered the possibility of sourcing oil from Venezuela or Iran rather than increasing domestic drilling. Compared to Franklin Graham’s labeled post, this post is similarly misleading, pushing the same message about how the president’s energy policies have impacted energy independence. And yet, this post, which earned 55,000 interactions, has not received a label.

Fox News, Facebook, March 6, 2022 Energy Independence

Another example is a March 10 post from Mike Rowe.Rowe has hosted the TV series Six Degrees, which is sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and contains fossil fuel propaganda in every episode. Rowe’s nonprofit has also received funding from Koch Industries. In the post, which accompanies a pro-fossil fuel episode of Rowe’s web series Good Questions, Rowe writes: “One minute, America was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. The next minute, we’re back to buying oil from despots and sheiks, with gas prices at an all-time high. Honest question - Why would we allow energy independence to slip through our fingers?”

Again, the post creates a misunderstanding of energy independence, suggesting that the U.S. cannot be energy independent while importing oil from other countries and that the U.S. is no longer a net exporter of energy. Both claims are false. This post earned 30,000 interactions. Even though the misinformation in Rowe’s post mirrors the misinformation in the other labeled posts, it lacks a fact-check label.

High gas prices have been a key driver of climate change and energy-related Facebook misinformation since 2021.

Media Matters found high gas prices have been a key driver of Facebook misinformation not just since Russia invaded Ukraine, but for the entire seven-month period Media Matters examined, starting September 2021. In total, 41 out of the top 100 posts were in response to the pain Americans are feeling at the pump and while buying everyday goods. These posts accounted for 1.8 million interactions.

The right has repeatedly blamed this crisis on various Biden administration policies despite a lack of evidence supporting that claim. The decision to cancel the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was cited in 30 of the top 100 posts as a main culprit behind high gas prices. A March survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that in reality, oil companies aren’t drilling because of pressure from investors to reliably return profits through dividends and stock buybacks instead of investing in new production. Biden also approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in his first year than the Trump administration did in its first year. As for the Keystone XL pipeline extension, experts have pointed out that it would do virtually nothing to lower gas prices in the short term. Nonetheless, 34% of posts about high gas prices also argued for increased fossil fuel extraction, production, and infrastructure to further U.S. energy independence.

The right has consistently used loaded language like “energy independence” to defend fossil fuels despite their harmful impacts on human health, geopolitics, and the economy. Meanwhile, right-wing media and influencers spread misinformation about the viability of renewable energy, and even inaccurately blamed the shortcomings of fossil fuel infrastructure on wind energy during the Texas winter storm and power outages in February 2021. Understanding how the global energy market works could help media consumers understand that renewable energy can move the country closer to self-reliance, and that there is legislation moving with the aim of making that happen. As climate advocates have pointed out, transitioning to renewable energy is the only way for countries to achieve this sort of freedom from the fluctuations of the global fossil-fuel system in which we are deeply entrenched.

Even while Facebook managed to label 2 posts, these labels can only have a limited impact when they are so vastly outnumbered by disinformation across media. With midterm elections approaching, the Biden administration has broken a key climate campaign promise by reopening federal lands for new oil and gas drilling lease sales. The move is unlikely to help with high gas prices in the short term and is in direct conflict with the International Energy Agency’s pathway to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Voters must be equipped with accurate information about the conditions that created high gas prices. According to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, 71% of Americans blame Putin a “great deal” or a “good amount” for the increases in gas prices. However, the poll also found that 52% blame the price increases on Democratic Party policies, and 51% blame Biden. Facebook’s failure to uphold its own policies and crack down on misinformation is having real consequences and influencing how Americans view both this crisis and the role that fossil fuels should play in our economic future.

Methodology

Using Crowdtangle, Media Matters compiled a list of Facebook pages that post climate change and energy-related misinformation since December 2021, yielding 140 pages. These pages fit at least one of the following criteria at the time they were added to the list:

Pages that posted climate or energy-related misinformation at least once every two weeks.

Pages with a stated purpose of opposing the established science of climate change that also posted at least once a month.

Nearly all are ideologically right-leaning, in that they fit the relevant criteria laid out by Media Matters.

The researchers then compiled all of the posts from these pages between September 1, 2021, and April 1, 2022. We found that 126 pages posted content that contained climate change or energy-related keywords during the time period studied. The researchers then determined which posts contained climate change or energy-related misinformation and further analyzed the top 100 posts with the most interactions.

We labeled posts as climate misinformation if they fit at least one of the following criteria:

Undermined the existence or impacts of climate change, the unequivocal human influence on climate change, and/or the need for corresponding urgent action according to the IPCC scientific consensus and in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement;

Misrepresented scientific data, including by omission or cherry-picking, in a seeming effort to erode trust in climate science, climate-focused institutions, experts, and/or solutions;

Falsely publicized efforts as supportive of climate goals that in fact contribute to climate warming or contravene the scientific consensus on mitigation or adaptation.

We defined posts as being related to or about energy or climate change if a post had any of the following terms in the message, the included link, article headline, or article description:

“climate change,” “global warming,” “blame climate change,” “blame global warming,” “climate alarmism,” “climate alarmists,” “climate change hoax,” “climate hysteria,” “climate change panic,” “climate hoax,” ”climate panic," “climate fearmongering,” “climate deception,” “climate lies,” “agw fraud,” “agw hoax,” “#climatefraud,” “#fakeweather,” “#climatebrawl,” “#gretathunbergexposed,” “#noclimateemergency,” “#smartdust,” “#climatescam,” “#globalwarmingfraud,” “#cloudseeding,” “#stopchemtrails,” “#climateconspiracy,” “#chematrailawareness,” “#forcedclimatechange,” “#weathercontrol,” “#globalcooling,” “#climatehoax,” “#climatecult,” “#carbonkleptomania,” “#alarmism,” “Green New Deal,” “VCEA,” “Virginia Clean Economy Act,” “Climate change,” “net-zero,” “net zero,” “emissions,” “energy,” “carbon,” “Build Back Better,” “BBB,” “climate bill,” “social welfare spending,” “social spending bill,” “climate agenda,” “social spending package,” “climate spending agenda,” “anti-china bill,” “china bill,” “America Concedes,” “Paris Agreement” “Paris Climate Agreement” “Paris Climate Accords,” “EV,” EVs,” “electric vehicle,” “electric vehicles,” “electric car,” “electric cars,” “electric bus,” “electric bus fleet,” “electric trucks,” “electric truck.” “net zero,” “net-zero,” “solar power,” “solar panels,” “wind turbine,” “windmills,” “renewable energy,” “renewables,” “green energy,” “clean energy,” “battery storage,” “baseload,” “power grid,” “energy grid,” “forced electrification,” “intermittency,” “energy costs,” “rising energy costs,” “rising energy prices,” “biden energy policy,” “biden energy policies,” “biden energy costs,” “biden energy prices,” “energy inflation,” “gas prices,” “high energy costs,” “higher energy costs,” “keystone,” “Keystone XL,” “energy security,” “energy independence,” “affordable energy,” “reliable energy,” “energy independent.” “woke capital,” “BlackRock,” “woke capitalism,” “boycott,” “divestment,” “ESG,” “energy,” “fossil fuels,” “oil,” “gas,” “natural gas,” “China,” “polluter,” “pollution,” “emissions,” “carbon,” “COP,” “COP27,” “#FLOP26,” “FLOP26,” “global elites,” “elites,” “private jets,” “globalists,” “hypocrites,” “waste,” “failure,” “climate hypocrisy,” “the great reset,” “authoritarianism,” “authoritarian,” “climate,” “climate lockdown.” “climate lock down,” “democracy,” “climate emergency,” “climate crisis.”

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https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/10/researchers-warn-that-social-media-may-be-fundamentally-at-odds-with-science/

r

esearchers Warn That Social Media May be ‘Fundamentally at Odds’ with Science

Social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. Read more at TechCrunch

no lnx

a special set of editorials published in today’s issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason.The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards.

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In an incisive (and free to read) opinion piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the basic disconnect with what scientists need and what social media platforms provide is convincingly laid out.

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“Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces,” they write. “It is debatable whether social media platforms that are designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users are the most productive channel for convincing skeptical publics that settled science about climate change or vaccines is not up for debate.”

The most elementary feature of social media that reduces the effect of communication by scientists is pervasive sorting and recommendation engines. This produces what Brossard and Scheufele call “homophilic self-sorting” — the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they’re preaching to the choir.

“The same profit-driven algorithmic tools that bring science-friendly and curious followers to scientists’ Twitter feeds and YouTube channels will increasingly disconnect scientists from the audiences that they need to connect with most urgently,” they write. And there’s no obvious solution: “The cause is a tectonic shift in the balance of power in science information ecologies. Social media platforms and their underlying algorithms are designed to outperform the ability of science audiences to sift through rapidly growing information streams and to capitalize on their emotional and cognitive weaknesses in doing so. No one should be surprised when this happens.”

“But it’s a good way for Facebook to make money,” said H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals.

Thorp, who also wrote an editorial on the topic, told me that there are at least two distinct problems with the way scientists and social media interact these days.

“One is that, especially with Twitter, scientists like to use it to bat things around and openly air ideas, support them or shoot them down — the things they used to do standing around a blackboard, or at a conference,” he said. “It was going on before the pandemic, but now it’s become a major way that kind of interchange happens. The problem with that, of course, is that there is now an enduring permanent record of it. And some of the hypotheses that get made and turn out to be wrong, overturned in the ordinary course of science, get cherry picked by people who are trying to undermine what we’re doing.”

“The second is naivete about the algorithms, especially Facebook’s, which put a very high premium on disagreement and informal posts that spread disagreement. You know, ‘my uncle wore a mask to church and got COVID anyway’ — that’s going to beat out authoritative info every time,” he continued.

As Brossard and Scheufele point out, the combination of these things puts scientists “at a distinct disadvantage…as some of the very few participants in public debates whose professional norms and ethics dictate that they prioritize reliable, cumulative evidence over persuasive power.”

Sadly, there isn’t much anyone can do on the science side. Arguably the more they participate in the system, the more they reinforce the silos around themselves. No one is arguing that we should just give up — but we really need to acknowledge that the problem isn’t just a matter of the science community being less effective communicators on social media than peddlers of disinformation.

Thorp also acknowledged that this is only the latest phase of growing anti-factual tendencies and politicization that goes back decades.

“I think people tend to get a little more emotional about this without recognizing it’s a very simple thing: The political parties aren’t going to take the same position — and when one of those positions is scientifically rigorous, the other is going to be against science,” he explained. That the Democratic party is more often on the side of science is true enough, but it has also been on the other side with GMOs and nuclear power, he pointed out. The important thing is not who is for what, but that the two parties define themselves by opposition.

“That’s a political party coming to the realization that it was more politically useful to be against science than to be for it,” he said. “So that’s another thing scientists are naive about, saying ‘we’re not getting our message across!’ But you’re up against this political machine that now has the power of Facebook behind it.”

Brossard and Scheufele make a final parallel in the defeat of Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue — afterwards, no one called for special training to outplay supercomputers, and no one blamed Kasparov for not playing well enough. After the shock wore off, it was clear to everyone that we’d turned a corner not just in chess but in the possibilities of computing and algorithms. (Kasparov’s own views have evolved as well, as he told me a while back.)

“The same understanding is now here for scientists,” they write. “It’s a new age for informing public debates with facts and evidence, and some realities have changed for good.”

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scotus ruled texas law BS 6 22

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/network-hate-fueled-accounts-thriving-instagram

no lnx pix

media Matters has identified a network of Instagram accounts that collaborate and coordinate activity to remain on the platform and promote overt racism. These accounts -- some of which self-identify as “racistgram” -- coalesce around white supremacy and are fueled by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that has inspired multiple racial attacks, including the deadly, racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend. 

Media Matters has reported on hate speech on Instagram before. One of the accounts identified in our previous reporting on Instagram’s poor moderation is affiliated with a website that was cited repeatedly in the alleged Buffalo shooter’s online writings. As of publishing, the account remains on Instagram -- where it has been since at least June 2020 -- with over 18,500 followers. Many of the accounts identified within this “racistgram” network follow this larger account, which pushes the “puppet master” conspiracy theory.

How these accounts operate

While the theme and tone of each node of this network varies, they generally layer their commentary in satire, irony, and in-group jokes, often to the point where the true meaning would be lost on an outside viewer. Other accounts openly discuss strategies to increase the white population, lament supposed Jewish control, and discuss the role of their Instagram posting in the larger movement. 

The accounts in this “racistgram” network typically make minimal effort to tailor their content to avoid moderation by Instagram and are repeatedly removed from the platform. But the users behind these accounts are able to return to Instagram by simply making a new account, and having their new handle circulated through the community, using the existing network to promote themselves and regain lost followers. One account Media Matters identified in this network claimed that it has reemerged on Instagram at least 15 times under new handles.

Three screenshots of Instagram accounts sharing a post from a new account to promote it to their followers]

These accounts do not just ambiently fester on Instagram -- they use the platform and its many features with intention. Instagram Live and Stories allow for more ephemeral, and therefore harder to moderate, content. Additionally, accounts sometimes include links in their bios or use the link sticker in order to organize on other platforms, link to back up Instagram accounts, and even sell merchandise. (Link sticker is a feature that allows users to put hyperlinks in Instagram Stories and has a track record of misuse.)

three screenshots showing users commenting on their use of Instagram Live, link-in-bio, and the Stories link sticker feature]

While these features are undoubtedly helpful for creators and influencers, the app’s appeal for these racist accounts likely lies in a more core component of the platform -- the recommendation algorithms. Meta claims that its “Recommendations Guidelines are designed to maintain a higher standard than our Community Guidelines,” but Media Matters has reported on how features like suggested accounts and the “Explore” page recommend violative content. 

When discussing the best way to “race pill” other Instagram users, two accounts within the racistgram network noted that, while Instagram tries to prevent its algorithms from leading people to their content,they can circumvent this effort by developing connections with more palatable accounts: “The way the algorithm works, we just have to make these connections,” one said. “Once we start making these connections to them, and we basically just link ourselves to them and the algorithm. … We just pretty much have to tie ourselves into them on the algorithm, but once we do, it's gonna be a trailblazer, because it's not hard.”

Their strategy relies on using the “infrastructure” they have created through this Instagram network, and they acknowledge that “it's going to take multiple pages” to introduce other users to their ideology.They describe the need for pages that have a wide range in how they project racist sentiments, saying they all have a role in the migration of users to the most overtly racist pages in their network.

Coordinated campaigns

In addition to sharing racist and antisemitic content, these accounts work together to orchestrate coordinated campaigns through Instagram. In April, one of the accounts spearheaded an “anitsemite pride month,” during which the network conducted coordinated harassment, sometimes referred to as “raids,” on social media accounts belonging to Jewish users and Jewish organizations. They also worked to spread antisemitic content and celebrated the birthday of Hitler.

screen shots of an account directing its followers to spam posts with antisemitic comments

Media Matters reported to Instagram the initial post announcing the racist intentions for the month -- a post which the account owner later noted was their most popular to date. Instagram reviewed the report and responded, stating that the company did not remove the post because the “photo likely doesn’t go against our Community Guidelines.”

a screenshot of the response to a report of the violative content stating that it would not be removed

We then requested an appeal to this decision. As of publishing, there has been no response to this appeal, and the request is still in the “received” stage.

a screenshot of the request to review the decision to not remove the violate content

Later in the month, Media Matters attempted to report the account leading the “antisemite pride month.” Instagram again decided not remove the reported content.

a screenshot of the response to a report stating that the violative account would not be removed

In early May, after the “antisemite pride month” campaign had been allowed to flourish on the platform, the account finally disappeared from Instagram, though the cause of its disappearance is unclear.

The coordinated harassment, or “raids,” performed by this network is not isolated to “antisemite pride month.” These users repeatedly share posts from other accounts to their stories and direct their followers to “spam” or raid the comments with racial slurs and other forms of hate speech.

screenshots of an Instagram story in which a user is directing their followers to harass another user by leaving racist comments on their photo

The accounts also collaborated to develop content around the brief #DarkMAGA online trend, which celebrates the idea of former President Donald Trump returning to politics with more anger and violence toward enemies of his supporters.

a screenshot of a story showing all of the users who had Dark MAGA profile photos]

Instagram has long claimed that it is working to address issues of hate speech and violent rhetoric on its platform. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, even went as far as to say in an interview last summer, “I don't think it's good enough, for instance, for us just to remove hate speech and racism from our platform as much as possible. I think we should be a force to reduce racial inequality in the world.” And yet, the company continues to roll out new features in an attempt to maintain relevance while clearly failing to protect its users by upholding its own policies.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-profited-ads-promoting-white-supremacist-great-replacement-theory

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oops not facebook]

posted on realclear investigations oct 2021

https://www.axios.com/googles-climate-denial-crackdown-misinformation-e0925b26-76ff-4c1d-8b11-c498cc8527d9.html

interesting this is axios, good news [for planet anyway] tho they think it will be read as bog tech censorship?!

google'snew policy of demonetizing climate denial content marks a significant step in its efforts to rein in climate misinformation.

Why it matters: Videos promoting clear falsehoods about the existence of global warming or its causes have long found a home on YouTube, which Google owns.

• Meanwhile, on search, ads for climate contrarian websites have consistently appeared next to search listings for sites offering politically neutral and scientifically rigorous evidence.

Driving the news: The company's announcement Thursday that the new policy takes effect Nov. 1, during the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, could cool the political polarization around climate in the U.S.

How it works: Per a Google statement, the policy affects the monetization of "content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

• "This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."
• Google plans to use "automated tools and human review" to put the policy into practice.
• The system does not seek to limit policy debate, making Google's job easier but potentially allowing the promotion of partisan assaults on established science.
• Discerning denial can be tough. Google says it will "look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim."

Our thought bubble, from Axios' Scott Rosenberg: Facebook and Google have both faced censorship accusations from conservatives who object to measures that have sought to limit misinformation on COVID, elections and other topics.

• YouTube's move on climate is likely to encounter similar objections, given the politically polarized views on this issue, especially in the U.S.

Between the lines: The policy also brings Google's ad revenue strategy more in line with its sustainability agenda.

• The company aims to run on 100% carbon-free energy by 2030.
• On Wednesday, Google rolled out new features to help travelers limit the carbon footprint of their flights via Google Flights.

What's next: The policy will immediately be put to the test with COP26 taking place.

• Spikes in social media activity around climate change over the last six months coincided with major news events, according to data from Keyhole.
• Peaks in search activity also tend to occur around news events, including climate summits, according to Google Trends.

What we're watching: Whether Google's move boosts pressure on Facebook to modify its efforts to limit climate misinformation.

• Facebook expanded its Climate Science Center last month and steers users there when they search for climate-related terms. Facebook also pledged $1 million to a grant program to combat misinformation.
• But activists say the platform still allows denial to flourish.

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no lnx twt

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-and-instagram-have-allowed-and-profited-advertising-pushing-false-ukraine-us

Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/16/22

Meta has repeatedly allowed -- and profited from -- ads pushing a false conspiracy theory about biolabs in Ukraine which has been linked to both Russian propaganda and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The ads, which have run on Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, violate the platforms’ misinformation rules.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, a QAnon-supporting Twitter account helped spread a false conspiracy theory that the attack was undertaken to target U.S.-linked labs working to create bioweapons. In reality, the labs are focused on detecting diseases, and the conspiracy theory has its roots in a longstanding Russian disinformation effort. The false claims have spread online and among QAnon supporters, and the Russian government has invoked the conspiracy theory to defend the invasion.

A review by Media Matters found that since the invasion began, Meta has profited from the conspiracy theory by allowing at least nine ads to run on Facebook or Instagram pushing some form of the conspiracy theory, including an ad from Chinese state-controlled media. Meta’s rules explicitly prohibit ads that “include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers,” and at least one such fact-checker that Meta has partnered with, PolitiFact, has debunked the conspiracy theory. Although several ads were removed after Media Matters flagged them on Twitter, some are still running. Below is a rundown of all the ads we have found:

One ad on Facebook, from China’s official state press agency, features a video with a narrator saying, “With reports emerging about the U.S. running bioweapons lab in Ukraine, Syrian experts said the U.S. policy of setting up such labs in other countries poses risk to world security.”

Facebook biolabs ad Chinese state media

One Facebook ad, in French, featured a man pushing the claim and sharing a map of Ukrainian biolabs that apparently came from a QAnon-supporting Gab account.

Facebook biolabs ad1

Another Facebook ad featured a video of a woman at a prayer service saying, “As we wind up, I want us to pray for Ukraine. Really, I don’t know who is right or wrong. We may be saying, you know, I saw … something from another prayer group, but they were saying that there are U.S. biolabs in the Ukraine.”

Another ad, for Instagram, falsely claimed that “Russia found over 30 biological labs (with evidence of bioweapons) in Ukraine formed by the Pentagon in areas bordering Russia.”

Facebook biolabs ad2

An additional Instagram ad featured the (false) text “Pentagon Funded Bio-Weapons Labs in the Ukraine” and a video pushing the conspiracy theory, with a narrator saying, “For years now, Russia has made verifiable claims that the U.S. is running secret biological weapons labs around their borders.” The narrator also says that they are “reporting for Infowars,” a site whose content has been banned from Meta’s social media platforms.

Facebook biolabs ad3

Yet another ad, on Facebook, features a video of a woman saying about Ukraine, “There’s biolabs there, they’re talking about in the news today. The U.S. has them there. And so there are strategic reasons why Ukraine is important, which I understand, and I can understand why the civilians in Russia would understand where their leader’s coming from.”

One ad on Facebook features a video of a man saying, “They’re actually saying that the biolabs exist,” adding that he does “believe they do” exist. Another man agreed with him, saying, “I believe they do too. Because somebody is trying to get it out, and somebody is trying to bury it.”

Another ad, whose listing in the Facebook ad library specifies the range paid for it to run, ran for a day on Facebook and Instagram. The ad featured a video of a man saying there is “some evidence of U.S. involvement in the biolabs found there in Ukraine” and attacking PolitiFact for its debunk of the conspiracy theory, saying the outlet is a “propaganda arm of the progressive left.” This means Meta made money from an ad not only pushing the conspiracy theory but also explicitly attacking one of its third-party fact checkers. And the same account ran another ad on Facebook and Instagram (whose listing in the Facebook ad library also specifies the range paid for it to run) featuring a video with the same man saying the House of Representatives passed a bill that “includes an astonishing $15 billion to Ukraine, you know, so that we can protect our investment in Ukrainian biolabs.”

Facebook biolabs ad4

Meta is not the only company to have made money off of this Russian and QAnon-connected disinformation. YouTube has also monetized multiple videos pushing the same conspiracy theory.

THE LATEST

Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory

03/16/22 11:59 AM EDT

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rg&b 3 22

cALL IT META IF YOU LIKE, BUT FACEBOOK STILL LOUSY AT DEALING WITH CLIMATE DISINFORMATION

A study released Wednesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that around half of the content from purveyors of climate science denial gets no warning labels or fact checking from Facebook moderators. Last May, Facebook vowed to attach “informational labels” to posts about the climate crisis and direct users to the social media platform’s “Climate Science Information Center.”

November, the CCDH published its Toxic Ten report, identifying just 10 publishers with articles that make up 69% of Facebook interactions with climate denial articles. Breitbart, the Federalist Papers, Daily Wire, and Russian state media were among the 10. What the researchers found was that 50.5% of the 184 most popular posts associated with articles promoting climate science denial carried no information label. Among them: A Breitbart article claiming global warming is not real and a “hoax”; a Washington Times article claiming that “COVID-19 and climate change are being used to steal our liberties”; a NewsBusters article referring to “alarmist climate propaganda”; a Daily Wire article claiming “the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism”; and a Breitbart article branding a leading climate scientist a “climate alarmist.” Of the other 49.5%, all had a label linking them to the climate science resource center, but just one was a fact check of bad information contained in the post.

Said CCDH’s Chief Executive Imran Ahmed, “By failing to do even the bare minimum to address the spread of climate denial information, Meta is exacerbating the climate crisis. Climate change denial—designed to fracture our resolve and impede meaningful action to mitigate climate change—flows unabated on Facebook and Instagram.” A spokesperson for Facebook claimed the CCDH report only covers the rollout of the warning system and not how effective it is now.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has pledged to initiate action against Facebook if it fails to do a better job at dealing with climate lies.....

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/facebook-investors/

Facebook misled investors about battling climate and COVID lies: SEC filings

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams February 20, 2022

In complaints to the U.S. government, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused the tech giant of misleading investors about combating climate and Covid-19 misinformation, The Washington Post revealed Friday.

Haugen has gained international attention for speaking out in the press and testifying to Congress. The former Facebook employee is represented by Whistleblower Aid, which filed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaints earlier this month.

The newspaper's reporting on redacted copies of the documents sparked demands for reforms at the social media network and its parent company, which rebranded as Meta last year in the face of widespread criticism.

"Frances Haugen's SEC filing shows yet again that Facebook cannot be trusted and needs Congress to step in to stop the spread of disinformation," said Michael Khoo, co-chair of the Climate Disinformation Coalition at Friends of the Earth.

As the Post's Cat Zakrzewski reported:

One complaint alleges that climate change misinformation was prominently available on Facebook and that the company lacked a clear policy on the issue as recently as last year, despite Facebook executives' committing to fight the "global crisis" during earnings calls. A second, companion complaint argues that while Facebook executives were publicly touting their efforts to remove harmful Covid misinformation, internal documents "paint a different story."

The complaint cites internal company communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments and internal surveys that showed the proliferation of Covid misinformation on the service.

"Facebook appears now to be spreading disinformation about its disinformation,"declared Khoo, noting that in an October 2021 letter, Nick Clegg, then-vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, "told the Climate Disinformation Coalition that there is only a 'small amount' of climate change disinformation on the platform."

Clegg, who was previously the U.K.'s deputy prime minister and led the Liberal Democrats party, was promoted this week to head of global affairs at Meta—a role that will put him "at the level" of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Similar to Clegg's letter, Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri "said that misinformation makes up a small amount of climate change content in the company's apps, and that it spikes periodically, such as during extreme weather events," the Post reported Friday. "He said the company has taken steps to make it easier for fact-checkers to find climate content."

Pusateri also highlighted the company's efforts to remove vaccine misinformation and elevate "authoritative information" on public health and climate, adding that "there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to stopping the spread of misinformation, but we're committed to building new tools and policies to combat it."

However, activists and experts are not impressed. The Post explained that "the company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus."

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told the newspaper that the company's approach is "disturbing."

"Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than Covid-19," said Mann, known for debunking climate lies, including in recent testimony to Congress. "The fact that they're treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic."

Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted Friday that "Facebook hasn't even taken the most obvious step to combatting climate disinformation: banning fossil fuel advertising. They don't allow tobacco or firearms ads—so why allow fossil fuels?"

According to Khoo at Friends of the Earth:

Whether it's fueling the insurrection, trans-youth bullying, teen body image issues, or climate denial, Facebook's algorithm enables the small fringe to tear apart our communities and our values. When last year's winter storm decimated Texas residents, a few fossil fuel-backed voices falsely blamed frozen windmills, and we documented how that narrative exploded on Facebook.

Congress must now step in and require the type of safety reporting that is found in industries from car manufacturers to agriculture. It must force Facebook to disclose its data on platform safety and extremism, with ecosystem-wide reports on disinformation harms.

"Facebook amplifies fringe views like climate denial," the campaigner added, "and we must stop it from letting a radical minority overpower the majority."

At least some federal lawmakers are already paying attention to the company's conduct, as three Democratic senators made clear in a December letter to Zuckerberg.

"Disinformation that downplays the crisis or rejects climate change threatens the potential for humankind to act collectively to pull itself back from the brink," they wrote. "Your content moderation decisions can either galvanize an effort to save our plant or quash it."

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SEE UMBERTO ECO DEF OF FASCISM ON SCHIZO ENEMY:

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-ads-tucker-carlsons-hungary-vs-soros-documentary-have-been-viewed-millions-times

NO LNX PIX TWT

Facebook ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization -- the season finale of Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation “documentary” series -- have garnered more than 5.2 million impressions.

A new Media Matters analysis has found that Fox Nation -- the streaming service for Fox News “superfans” -- has run at least 56 ads since January 27 promoting the episode, which relies on antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories to attack George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. The ad data is not available through the Facebook Ad Library because Fox Nation isn’t running these promotions as political ads, which is the only type Facebook’s Ad Library archives or provides data for. However, external data from Pathmatics reveals that Fox Nation spent more than $48,000 on the ads, earning more than 5.2 million impressions.

Hungary vs. Soros is the latest installment in the “Tucker Carlson Originals” series, which has a shameful record of using shock and awe tactics to push antidemocratic propaganda. Despite Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist brand, the streaming service has heavily relied on the prime-time host to promote and grow the platform.

The “documentary” calls upon antisemitic stereotypes to demonize Soros and puff up the far-right nationalist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has embraced authoritarian tactics and faces reelection in April. Carlson simultaneously pushes many of the same talking points about Soros that Orbán used in his 2018 election campaign. As my Media Matters colleague Nikki McCann Ramirez noted, Carlson portrays Soros in the series “as an insidious, unseen political kingmaker who seeks to destroy the national sovereignty of Hungary and transform its culture by leveraging his money and control of the media" against a backdrop of menacing synth chords and black and white images of Soros.

Facebook is allowing Fox Nation to run ads promoting Hungary vs. Soros despite its authoritarian and antisemitic undertones. In fact, Fox Nation has run at least 56 ads related to the episode, with at least 44 still active at the time of publication. (The other 12 ads are no longer shown in Facebook’s ad library.)

The ads, which have been seen millions of times by Facebook users, include one of four texts that attack Soros for “unchecked political power” and/or praise Orbán for being Soros’ “newest foe.” Additionally, all the ads link to Fox Nation’s website, where users can subscribe to watch it.

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_2

Fox Nation_Hungary vs. Soros_ads_1

Some of the ads also include a promotional 15-second video of the episode.

CitationFrom the February 11, 2022, Facebook ad from Fox Nation

Before Fox Nation started running paid advertisements for Hungary vs. Soros, several Fox Facebook pages shared posts promoting it, including pages associated with The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Fox Nation.

It was also repeatedly promoted on Fox News itself, not only on Carlson’s show, but also during his interviews on The Five and Fox & Friends.The Fox News website featured an ad for it on its homepage and published an article on the piece. Fox Nation also sent out a promotional email that said, “George Soros is waging cultural and political warfare on the West, but he’s met his match in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”

The right-wing fixation on Soros is a problem across the Fox brand. According to a transcript analysis from Kinetiq video database, Fox News mentioned “Soros” a total of 435 times between January 1, 2021, and February 8, 2022, with the coverage ramping up starting in November. With Facebook’s long history of profiting from the spread of harmful content, it is unsurprising that the platform is enabling the promotion of this production to millions.

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SUBSTX --> NYT

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with

...Just days after the Big Oil hearing, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an international nonprofit that “seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation,” released areport finding that posts linking to content from just ten publishers account for 69 percent of Facebook users’ interactions with climate denial content.

Dubbed the “Toxic Ten,” those publishers are:

• Breitbart
• The Western Journal
• Newsmax
• Townhall Media
• Media Research Center
• The Washington Times
• The Federalist
• The Daily Wire
• Russian State Media
• The Patriot Post

Examples of viral climate denial content included aWashington Times article claiming there is a “cult of ‘climate change’” whose “worship” is based on unproven science, a Breitbart piece promoting conspiracy theories that climate legislation involves “lockdown decrees,” and a Newsmax article telling readers not to “worry too much about CO2 baking the planet.”

This type of content didn’t emerge on its own. CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said the fossil fuel industry has “shown its willingness to embrace new technologies and every tool available to it to create harm — and climate denial is harm.” Social media, he says, is the last frontier for Big Oil to cultivate opposition against climate action that might threaten their bottom line.

“If they can’t win the battle on legislation, they’re going to seek to undermine the consensus, the self-preservatory consensus that underpins the push for legislation. They know that you can’t possibly get political agreement if we can’t even agree on the basic facts,” Ahmed said. “And all they have to do is simulate the appearance of dissent, of debate.”

According to the report, Facebook and Google, which have portrayed themselves as “green” and allies in the fight for climate action, are doing business with denial. CCDH’s research found that Facebook failed to label 92 percent of the Toxic Ten’s climate disinformation, despite the company’s pledge to start placing information labels on posts about climate change. It found that eight of the Toxic Ten have received a combined $5.3 million in revenue from Google ads in the last six months alone. Google promised to stop attaching ads to climate denial content in October, setting its own deadline of November 9 — but it hasn’t acted on that promise yet.

[twt]

...CCDH isn’t alone in calling this out: online climate disinformation has been identified as an urgent and emerging issue in pieces published in The New York Times, The Conversation, and The Nation within the past week.

CCDH’s research was released during COP26, this year’s United Nations climate summit, where at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists — more than any country’s delegation — were present, according to an analysis by Corporate Accountability and other advocacy groups.

Go figure: the industry’s attempts to halt climate action through third parties have been simultaneously occurring online, where, thanks to internet trolls, right-wing publications, and the cooperation of social media platforms, they can now reach exponentially more members of the public. At least two of the Toxic Ten have historic ties to funding from ExxonMobil: 

• Media Research Center, a self-described watchdog against “leftist bias in the news media and popular culture,” received at least $50,000 from ExxonMobil directly in between 2000 and 2003, and another $50,000 in 2009, along with more than $4.5 million from the Scaife Foundations, which themselves are financed in large part by the oil industry.
• Townhall, a right-wing media group originally founded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has received at least $870,000 in grants from ExxonMobil, according to the Climate Investigations Center.

Digital platforms make that particularly easy through frequency bias — a fundamental psychological characteristic that causes humans to believe that something must be true or at least popular if we see it frequently enough. And disinformation, whether about vaccinations or climate change or electoral processes, is “sticky,” or “chewy,” in Ahmed’s words — it gets people talking.

Ben Decker, CEO of Memetica, a firm that works to investigate disinformation across digital media platforms, called climate disinformation “the legacy disinformation narrative plaguing America,” and fossil fuel companies the “historical purveyors” of that disinformation.

“The content itself becomes a space where fossil fuel companies can advertise themselves,” said Decker, who says policies to address climate change, not necessarily the science itself, are now the greatest target for these kinds of attacks.

Both Decker and Ahmed referred to the “asymmetry” of these so-called debates, which are manufactured with the help of the fossil fuel industry’s immense resources, and enabled by social media platforms that profit from publishers who advertise climate denial content on their sites.

So how do we tackle the climate disinformation crisis?

CCDH’s report calls on social media companies to stop monetizing and profiting from climate denial, and to comprehensively label climate disinformation on their websites. “It is amazing that the regulatory framework for a bodega in Manhattan is more onerous than that for a company like Facebook, which has literally caused at least one genocide,” Ahmed said, in reference to the violence in Myanmar.

In Decker’s view, it’s important for social media companies to codify exactly what images and words constitute climate disinformation if they’re going to prevent its spread. “They’re coy and smart around the words that they use,” he said of publishers and bad actors that facilitate harm over these platforms.

Growing wells of academic and journalistic research on evolving climate disinformation, and now the ongoing House Oversight investigation, could help define and identify harmful content. But if you ask Ahmed, the problem goes deeper than a lack of consensus or standards.

“We get too tied up in the technology of algorithms, automated moderation, AI and machine learning,” Ahmed said. “It’s a moral choice to gaslight the earth, and that’s what social media companies are doing. They’re making a moral choice to do business with climate denial. These are rapacious companies willing to sell out their communities, nations, and the planet, for their own wealth.”

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ICYMI News Roundup

• The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing
• Biden Highlights Electric Vehicles While Asking for Inquiry Into High Gas Prices
• How Exxon duped "The Daily"
• How 'Low Carbon' Energy Became the New 'Low Tar' Cigarette
• US auctions off oil and gas drilling leases in Gulf of Mexico after climate talks
• Top Gas Exporters Say They're Victims of 'Cancel Culture'

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/opinion/climate-change-facebook-glasgow.html

GREG BENSINGER

Social Media Is Polluted With Climate Denialism

Nov. 12, 2021

Greg Bensinger

Mr. Bensinger is a member of the editorial board.

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This fall, Exxon Mobil started targeting New Yorkers with Facebook advertisements that warned about a proposed law that would require electric-only appliances in some buildings. “If your household was required to go full electric, it could cost you more than $25,600 to replace major appliances,” one ad reads.

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But the ad doesn’t tell the whole story: The law would apply only to new buildings, making Exxon’s cost claims specious at best. Other advertisements, among roughly 1,200 placed by the fossil fuel giant found by the artificial intelligence outfit Eco-Bot.Netthis year, claimed oil pipelines are necessary to keep “energy affordable and accessible” and that natural gas helps customers “meet their environmental goals.”

These are examples of so-called greenwashing, or corporate attempts to underplay companies’ true impact on the environment. Along with other climate misinformation on social media, such ads have become a potent threat to efforts to combat global warming.Researchers for the environmental group Stop Funding Heat found that climate misinformation is viewed as often as 1.36 million times daily on Facebook.

Social media companies simply aren’t rising to the challenge of rising sea levels. Climate change is an urgent threat, but the companies are treating misinformation around it with far less urgency than other issues like political conspiracy theories, hate speech and lies about Covid vaccines. Climate content can be considered opinion and is therefore exempt from standard fact-checking procedures, which climate change deniers have seized on to push misleading information onto the sites.

The largest social media firms demonstrated in last year’s presidential election that they can effectively combat some misinformation by appending warning labels, using algorithmic suppression and adding links to more reliable news sources. But such work requires sustained effort, and Facebook, for one, dismantled its well-intentioned civic integrity group overseeing election misinformation shortly after the 2020 presidential vote.

“The results from the American presidential election show that the social media companies have the capacity to address misinformation on a broad scale,” said John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who is advising Facebook on its climate misinformation efforts. “But they’ve not put the resources or effort behind this that are necessary.”

Even with the rapid shift in public opinion and the outward signs of global warming in recent years, social media companies have been slow to adapt, allowing sometimes blatant disinformation to flourish unchecked on their sites. Under Facebook company guidelines, climate content may be categorized as opinion and subject to no more scrutiny than peer-reviewed scientific research.

Social media companies have a standard playbook for addressing many online falsehoods: add warning labels, push them lower in an algorithmically driven news feed, remove them or penalize their creators by suspending or barring them from using the site. But often misleading posts, such as one that claims combating climate change “involves Americans giving up their freedom and way of life,” carry an incongruous and wishy-washy Facebook label about local average temperatures. Compare that to the labels appended to former President Donald Trump’s voting misinformation posts, which Facebook called “disputed” or “misleading.”

Posts featuring conspiracy theories around Texas’ February power grid failure that left many residents freezing in the dark racked up millions of views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, particularly ones falsely suggesting that frozen wind turbines or President Biden’s energy policies were to blame. The companies did little to intervene. Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, falsely alleged in a tweet that Mr. Biden’s energy policies were “leaving millions of Texans freezing to death.” Twitter never appended a clarifying label.

Employees at Facebook have wrestled internally with how to approach climate change misinformation since at least 2019, according to documents released by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. According to one exchange, an employee seemed flummoxed by the company’s refusal to remove posts featuring climate change denial, because global warming is not a matter of opinion. Another employee said Facebook removes posts when “content may lead to imminent harm against people offline.”

[Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

What does climate change look like around the world?

From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality.

What should our leaders be doing?

Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.

What are the worst climate risks in your country?

Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.

Where are Americans suffering most?

Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.]

Facebook said its policy of not fact-checking or labeling posts from politicians was justified because the company doesn’t “want to limit political speech on the platform” — despite evidence it has that politicians are more likely to be believed than regular users and their posts are more widely shared.

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Facebook, which has called climate change the “greatest threat we all face,” has established only a sparsely visited section on its main site, known as the Climate Science Center, with occasional articles addressing rising global temperatures.

Climate skeptics are simply altering tactics from outright climate change denial to discrediting evidence and shifting blame from corporations to individuals, said Michael Mann, the author of “The New Climate War.”

On YouTube, the nonprofit Heartland Institute, known for attacking climate science, has backed the German influencer Naomi Seibt, who has posted videos denying climate change “hysteria” and encouraging viewers to live carefree lives. But YouTube rarely appends warning labels directing users to more reliable information, even as her videos garner thousands of views.

YouTube says it uses software to make debunked climate content less likely to show up in people’s recommendation feeds, but the climate activism nonprofit Avaaz found last year that the algorithm still prompted millions of views of questionable videos. The group also found that YouTube was selling ads to run alongside them.

As a result, Google, YouTube’s parent company, recently took a baby step, announcing it will no longer allow websites and YouTube creators to make money off advertising that denies humans’ contributions to climate change or denies global warming. Similarly, Facebook said climate change and global warming were on a list of topics that could no longer be used by marketers to target advertising, starting next year.

But spreading false information on the sites remains as easy as making a few keystrokes.

With the public shifting toward acceptance of climate change, corporate strategies are also evolving, including companies’ use of paid influencers on Instagram and TikTok who embark on idyllic road trips to Joshua Tree National Park using Shell gasoline or who snack on chips from Phillips 66 stations.In an effort to combat legislation to ban natural gas hookups, the fossil fuel industry also is paying Instagram stars to post videos of anodyne tasks like cooking tacos over gas stoves. The aim is to conjure good feelings about the brands, known to be significant contributors to carbon emissions, and perhaps even to convince consumers that they are stylish.

Elsewhere on the web, pages have sprung up with names like Climate Change Is Crap and Climate Change Is Natural to spew denialism on social media — no targeted ads needed. One headline from Climate Realism: “Evidence Indicates Climate Change Doesn’t Threaten Human Health.”

Social media could be a forum f or healthy debate about climate action, but the companies’ flimsy policies around policing climate change misinformation stand in the way. Automated software systems are simply not enough to combat misinformation about an unalterably changing Earth.

Facebook, YouTube and other companies have shown they have the power to amplify facts and suppress lies — will they use that to help protect Earth from its most dire threat?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/facebook-jan-6/

pro pub

Series: The Insurrection

The Effort to Overturn the Election

Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.

The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously— turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of then-President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.

“LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE!!!” read a post a month before the Capitol assault. “WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !”

Another post, made 10 days after the election, bore the avatar of a smiling woman with her arms raised in apparent triumph and read, “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!”

One post showed a Civil War-era picture of a gallows with more than two dozen nooses and hooded figures waiting to be hanged. Other posts called for arrests and executions of specific public figures — both Democrats and Republicans — depicted as betraying the nation by denying Trump a second term.

“BILL BARR WE WILL BE COMING FOR YOU,” wrote a group member after Barr announced the Justice Department had found little evidence to support Trump’s claims of widespread vote rigging. “WE WILL HAVECIVIL WAR IN THE STREETS BEFORE BIDEN WILL BE PRES.”

Facebook executives have downplayed the company’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and have resisted calls, including from its own Oversight Board, for a comprehensive internal investigation. The company also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the Jan. 6 attack. Facebook said it is continuing to negotiate with the committee.

The ProPublica/Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between Election Day and Jan. 6 and drew on internal company documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of Jan. 6.

Its efforts to police such content, the investigation also found, were ineffective and started too late to quell the surge of angry, hateful misinformation coursing through Facebook groups — some of it explicitly calling for violent confrontation with government officials, a theme that foreshadowed the storming of the Capitol that day amid clashes that left five people dead.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s newly renamed parent company, said that it was not responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. He pointed instead to Trump and others who voiced the lies that sparked the siege on the Capitol.

“The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd,” Pusateri said. “The former President of the United States pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, including in-person a short distance from the Capitol building that day. The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.”

To determine the extent of posts attacking Biden’s victory, The Post and ProPublica obtained a unique dataset of 100,000 groups and their posts, along with metadata and images, compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation. The Post and ProPublica used machine learning to narrow that list to 27,000 public groups that showed clear markers of focusing on U.S. politics. Out of the more than 18 million posts in those groups between Election Day and Jan. 6, the analysis searched for words and phrases to identify attacks on the election’s integrity.

The more than 650,000 posts attacking the election — and the 10,000-per-day average — is almost certainly an undercount. The ProPublica/Washington Post analysis only examined posts in a portion of all public groups, and did not include comments, posts in private groups or posts on individuals’ profiles. Only Facebook has access to all the data to calculate the true total — and it hasn’t done so publicly.

Facebook has heavily promoted groups since CEO Mark Zuckerberg made them a strategic priority in 2017. But the ones focused on U.S. politics have become so toxic, say former Facebook employees, that the company established a task force, whose existence has not been previously reported, specifically to police them ahead of Election Day 2020.

The task force removed hundreds of groups with violent or hateful content in the months before Nov. 3, according to the ProPublica/Post investigation.

Yet shortly after the vote, Facebook dissolved the task force and rolled back other intensive enforcement measures. The results of that decision were clear in the data ProPublica and The Post examined: During the nine increasingly tense weeks that led up to Jan. 6, the groups were inundated with posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election while the pace of removals noticeably slowed. Removals did not pick up again until the week of Jan. 6, but even then many of the groups and their posts remained on the site for months after, as Trump supporters continued to falsely claim election fraud and press for states to conduct audits of the vote or to impose new voting restrictions.

“Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the groups task force and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He did not comment on the quantitative findings of the ProPublica/Post investigation.

“The idea that we deprioritized our Civic Integrity work in any way is simply not true,” he said. “We integrated it into a larger Central Integrity team to allow us to apply the work that this team pioneered for elections to other challenges like health-related issues for example. Their work continues to this day.”

The investigation also reveals a problem with the way Facebook polices its groups. Former employees say groups are essential to the company’s ability to keep a stagnant American user base as engaged as possible and boost its revenue, which reached nearly $86 billion in 2020.

But they say as groups have grown more central to Meta’s bottom line, the company’s enforcement efforts have been weak, inconsistent and heavily reliant on the work of unpaid group administrators to do the labor-intensive work of reviewing posts and removing the ones that violate company policies. Many groups have hundreds of thousands or even millions of members, dramatically escalating the challenges of policing posts.

With the administrators themselves steeped in conspiracy theories about the election or, for example, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, reliable enforcement rarely takes place, say former employees. They say automated tools — which search for particular terms indicating policy violations — are ineffective and easily evaded by users simply misspelling key words.

“Groups are a disaster,” said Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team who filed a whistleblower complaint against the company and testified before Congress warning about the damaging effects of the company on democracy worldwide, as well as other problems.

Many of the group posts identified in the analysis fell into what a March internal Facebook report, first published by Politico, defined as “harmful non-violating narratives.” This refers to content that does not break Facebook’s rules, but whose prevalence can cause people to “act in ways which are harmful to themselves, others, or society at large.”

The report warned that such harmful narratives could have had “substantial negative impacts including contributing materially to the Capitol riot and potentially reducing collective civic engagement and social cohesion in the years to come.”

Pusateri declined to comment on specific posts but said the company does not have a policy forbidding posts or comments that attack the legitimacy of the election. He said the company has a dedicated groups integrity team and an ongoing initiative to protect people who use groups from harm.

Facebook officials have noted that more extreme content flowed through smaller social media platforms in the buildup to the Capitol attack, including detailed planning on bringing guns or building gallows that day. But Trump also used Facebook as a key platform for his lies about the election right up until he was banned on Jan. 6. And Facebook’s reliance on groups to drive engagement gave those lies unequaled reach. This combined with the sag in post-election enforcement to make Facebook a key vector for pushing the ideas that fueled violence on Jan. 6.

Critics and former employees say this also underscores a recurring issue with the platform since its founding in Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room in 2004: The company recognizes the need for enforcement only after a problem has caused serious damage, often in the form of real-world mayhem and violence.

Facebook didn’t discover the campaign by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency to spread hyperpartisan content and disinformation during the 2016 presidential election until months after Americans had voted. The company’s actions were late as well when Myanmar’s military leaders used Facebook to foment rapes, murders and forced migrations of minority Rohingya people. Facebook has apologized for failings in both cases.

The response to attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was similarly slow, as company officials debated among themselves whether and how to block the rapidly metastasizing lies about the election. The data shows they acted aggressively and comprehensively only after Trump supporters had battered their way into the Capitol, sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives.

The ProPublica/Post investigation “is a new and very important illustration of the company's unfortunate tendency to deal with safety problems on its platform in a reactive way,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School of Business. “And that almost by definition means that the company will be less effective, because it will not be looking out into the future and preventing problems before they happen.”

The Trouble With Policing Groups

Facebook’s newly vigorous enforcement actions the week of Jan. 6 — which resulted in Trump himself being banned from the platform — marked such a stark contrast from the company’s previous approach that some Trump supporters took to Facebook to complain about the reversal.

“Facebook is Getting Real Brave and Vicious Now,” Jerry Smith, a retired police officer from Missouri who created and ran a group called United Conservatives for America, wrote the day after the Capitol attack. “They Are Removing Tons of Posts From My Groups!”

In a recent interview at his home, Smith said he could not remember writing that message or which deletions prompted his response. He said he opposed political violence and posts that called for it. But he acknowledged it was difficult for him to remove such content as United Conservatives for America’s membership swelled to more than 11,000, with the number of posts surpassing what one person could monitor. The typical group in the ProPublica/Post analysis had more than 1,000 members.

Smith, who showed a reporter that his Facebook account had received 116 violations for breaking company rules, said he found some of Facebook’s policies reasonable but disagreed on how they should be enforced. He posted in United Conservatives for America and other groups at a frenetic pace long before Election Day. As early as the summer of 2020, he warned about alleged Democratic party plans to steal the election and also shared false information about the pandemic, including a video from a conspiracy theorist about the origins of the virus.

“And DEMS Are Pushing For Vote By Mail. Another Way For Them To Steal The Election,” he wrote in August 2020.

In the interview, Smith said he believes that American elections often are rigged and worries that COVID-19 vaccines may be tainted. He has used Facebook groups to share these beliefs with tens of thousands of people — and thinks Facebook’s enforcement of its policies is overly aggressive and a result of political bias against conservatives.

“Are you going to do away with their free speech?” said Smith. “If someone thinks it’s not a fair election … why can’t they have their opinion on whether it’s a fair election or not?”

Facebook Cracked Down Before the Election

Facebook’s problems with groups had long been obvious to company employees, who gathered on a remote video conference in early September 2020 to figure out how to stop groups from spreading hate, violent threats and misinformation as Election Day approached, according to former employees.

Known as the Group Task Force, the new unit they formed consisted of members of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, the specialized unit charged with protecting elections on the platform, as well as employees from engineering and operations teams who help oversee the contract moderators who review posts flagged by users or by automated systems, former employees said. The goal of the task force was to identify political groups with large numbers of posts and comments that violated the social giant’s rules against hate speech and calls for violence. Former employees involved in the effort said they wanted to apply the platform’s rules while respecting political debate and dialogue.

At the same time, Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations team was identifying and removing QAnon groups ahead of the election. The results of the two teams’ actions were striking. All of the more than 300 QAnon groups identified by ProPublica and The Post had been removed by October 2020, when Facebook announced a total ban on the movement, the analysis found.

In the end, the Group Task Force removed nearly 400 groups whose posts had been seen nearly 1 billion times before Election Day,according to a post on Workplace, Facebook’s internal discussion tool. The document later was included in the Facebook Papers disclosed by Haugen to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Still, members of the task force told ProPublica and The Post that the existence of such a team was an indictment of Facebook’s failure to police groups as part of its normal operations.

“The whole thing of the civic team needing to come in and do the takedowns was not a good state of affairs,” said one employee involved in the task force. “You could make a good argument that this should have already been done.”

On Nov. 5, Facebook banned “Stop the Steal,” a hugely viral group created on Election Day itself that quickly attracted over 300,000 members around a message rooted in attacking the legitimacy of the election. The company cited the prevalence of posts calling for violence and using hate speech in banning the group and all other groups using a similar name.

The next day, Nov. 6, the Group Task Force gathered virtually to celebrate its efforts, former employees said. Days later, a task force member published a Workplace post titled “Some Reflections on US2020” to bring attention to its work.

“Along with heroic efforts from other teams across the company, I truly believe the Group Task Force made the election safer and prevented possible instances of real world violence,” said the post.

But the focus on U.S. political groups and content undermining the election wouldn't last.

A Noticeable Drop in Enforcement

On Dec. 2, Facebook executives disbanded the Civic Integrity team and scattered its members to other parts of Facebook’s overall integrity team, reducing their influence. That resulted in the demise of the Group Task Force. The company also rolled back several emergency measures that had been put in place leading up to Election Day to control misbehavior in Facebook groups.

The Post/ProPublica investigation reveals the result: During the lull in enforcement, hundreds of thousands of posts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, spread lies about voter fraud and at times called for violence. Meanwhile, the company’s pace of group removals slowed to a crawl, the data analysis shows.

Among the content spreading in groups were videos in which former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn spread false claims of electoral fraud and called for martial law.(Through a spokesperson, Flynn declined to comment.) Another frequent post was a cartoon showing Trump chasing a masked Biden, who carried a bag labeled “election theft” with swing states depicted inside. It was posted more than 350 times in the political groups analyzed by ProPublica and the Post, attracting over 2,500 total likes.

One meme featured a photo of former Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who rose to fame in right-wing circles by leading a congressional committee’s investigation into the deadly 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, accompanied by the text “If you are ok with rigging an election to win, I am ok with martial law to stop you…” That was posted in groups at least 97 times, garnering over 3,500 total likes. Gowdy has denied saying the phrase.

Another meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!” It was posted at least 70 times, generating more than 2,400 total likes. The images and their spread in groups was identified using a CounterAction image analysis tool.

“Everyone needs to make a show of FORCE in DC on the 6th and any congress who doesnt follow the constitution or who doesnt stand up for our president (Pence included) needs to be ’corrected’ by WE the PEOPLE - on the front steps of the state house - for all the world to see!!! THIS IS HOW THE US DEALS WITH HER TRAITORS!!!” read one post from Dec. 27, 2020.

Ten days later, as rioters stormed the Capitol, the ProPublica/Post analysis shows, Facebook began taking down groups at a rate not seen since before the election. An internal Facebook spreadsheet from Jan. 6, which was included in Haugen’s disclosures, contains a section called “Action Items.” The top bullet point was a direction to conduct a “Sweep of Groups with V&I risk” — a term referring to violence and incitement. It had been 35 days since the Civic Integrity team, and with it the Group Task Force, had been disbanded.

Groups Still Active Long After Jan. 6

Months after the Capitol was breached, Facebook still was working to remove hundreds of political groups that violated company policies.

One of those was Smith’s United Conservatives for America, which continued to carry posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election until Facebook removed it in May.

When Smith met with a reporter in his home in early December, he’d just finished a 30-day posting ban on Facebook. In spite of his account’s history of violations, he was still managing at least one Facebook group — also called United Conservatives for America.

Like its predecessor, the new United Conservatives for America group was racking up strikes for violations of Facebook’s rules, according to a post Smith made to the group in September.

That post included a screenshot of an automated message from Facebook informing him that eight recent posts in the new United Conservatives for America group had been flagged by fact-checkers. As a result, the distribution of his group’s posts was being limited.

Smith remained defiant.

“I'm Not Blaming Our Members,” Smith wrote. “I’m Blaming FakeBook!”

In late December, after being asked about Smith’s account and group, Facebook said it banned his profile and removed United Conservatives for America, citing unspecified violations of its community standards.

Methodology...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/facebooks-failures-election-misinformation-contributed-deadly-capitol

no lnx many twt vid?

Facebook’s failures with election misinformation contributed to the deadly Capitol insurrection. A year later, the platform has failed to fix its problems.

Media Matters’ latest analysis has identified hundreds of active posts and Facebook groups still pushing “Stop the Steal” lies

WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY & CLARA MARTINY

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CARLY EVANS, NENA BEECHAM & JEREMY TUTHILL

PUBLISHED 01/05/22

Following the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook vowed to reduce election misinformation and prevent further incitement of violence by removing harmful content and suspending former President Donald Trump. But Media Matters’ latest analysis found that in the year since the January 6 attack, Facebook has not only repeatedly failed to moderate “Stop the Steal” content, baseless claims of election fraud, and other election misinformation, but its algorithm and other features have enabled such content to flourish.

Key findings:

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Right-leaning pages earned a greater proportion of interactions on election-related posts in the year after the January 6 insurrection than in the year before. In fact, these pages earned over 2 billion interactions -- or 54% of total interactions on election-related content -- on nearly 570,000 posts between January 7 and December 31, 2021. 

There are still at least 484 posts referencing “stop the steal” or “sts” still active on Facebook that were created by right-leaning Facebook pages in the year leading up to the insurrection, earning over 2.6 million interactions. 

Since January 7, 2021, another 238 posts with “stop the steal” or “sts” were posted by right-leaning pages and remain on the platform. These posts have earned over 415,000 interactionscombined.

As of January 3, there were at least 203 groups spreading election misinformation and blatant conspiracy theories, with nearly 240,000 combined members; 18 of them specifically include “Stop the Steal” or mention a “stolen election” in their name.

Jump to section...

HOW FACEBOOK FAILED TO STOP ELECTION MISINFORMATION BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE 2020 ELECTION

FAILURE: RIGHT-LEANING PAGES EARNED MORE INTERACTIONS ON ELECTION-RELATED POSTS THAN OTHER POLITICAL PAGES -- INCLUDING BY SPREADING KNOWN ELECTION MISINFORMATION

FAILURE: FACEBOOK CONTINUES TO PLATFORM NUMEROUS POSTS FROM RIGHT-LEANING PAGES ABOUT “STOP THE STEAL”

FAILURE: THERE ARE STILL HUNDREDS OF GROUPS FILLED WITH ELECTION MISINFORMATION ON FACEBOOK

METHODOLOGY

How Facebook failed to stop election misinformation before, during, and after the 2020 election

On November 17, 2020, just weeks after the presidential election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted that Facebook’s “systems performed well” during the election cycle, ignoring the platform’s litany of failures related to election misinformation before and after Joe Biden was elected. In December 2020, Facebook removed the “break glass” measures it had implemented during the campaign to boost authoritative sources and reduce election misinformation -- a move which seemingly contributed to the insurrection on January 6.

While Facebook had claimed victory, the company failed to recognize what it later called “a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election.” Even more embarrassing for the platform, Facebook researchers clearly had access to troves of data evincing the danger these efforts posed -- even while Media Matters and other external researchers and journalists were sounding the alarm. But Facebook still claimed ignorance when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to stop the certification of the election.

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The deadly insurrection on January 6 was aided, in part, by Facebook’s litany of failures before, during, and after the election, which include:

Allowing Trump and other right-wing pages to push harmful election misinformation -- and other misinformation and extreme rhetoric -- with impunity. Notably, Trump posted 433 times with election-related keywords between November 3, 2020, and November 2, 2021, earning over 176 million interactions, even as 75% of them featured at least one of Facebook's 18 different labels related to the election. Additionally, roughly a quarter of Trump's 6,081 Facebook posts that were created between January 1, 2020, and January 6, 2021, contained COVID-19 misinformation, election lies, or extreme rhetoric about his critics.

Failing to enforce its political ad ban and allowing right-wing pages to continue to run political ads with misinformation. Between November 4 and December 8, 2020 -- while the ban was in place -- Facebook enabled right-wing outlet The Daily Wire to earn millions of impressions on 24 political ads before finally removing them. There were another 50 ads that appeared to address social issues, elections, or politics, but ran without a disclaimer to circumvent the platform’s ban.

Failing to moderate “Stop the Steal” content, even after January 6, when the platform announced it would remove content with the phrase. Between Election Day and January 13, “Sedition Caucus” members -- the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the election results after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol -- mentioned keywords related to “Stop the Steal” a total of 193 times on Facebook.

Earning revenue from ads with election misinformation even after January 6. On November 1 -- nearly 10 months after the January 6 insurrection -- Media Matters found at least 46 ads on Facebook and Instagram calling to “decertify” the 2020 election. The ads earned over 8 million impressions.

In 2021, Facebook failed to effectively tackle election misinformation and penalize bad actors pushing it. Instead, the company has seemingly prioritized profit and positive PR over addressing the problems that made its platform a hotbed for fomenting political violence. One year after the deadly Capitol riot, these failures continue.

FAILURE: Right-leaning pages earned more interactions on election-related posts than other political pages -- including by spreading known election misinformation

Media Matters and other researchers have demonstrated again and again that there is no bias or censorship against conservatives on Facebook, despite right-wing claims to the contrary. In fact,right-leaning pages actually benefit from Facebook’s algorithm, which rewards sensational, divisive, and false content-- and the platform continued to disproportionately benefit right-wing content about voting and elections even after the Capitol attack.

Between January 7 and December 31, 2021, right-leaning Facebook pages that cover U.S. news and politics posted about election-related topics more frequently than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages, making nearly 570,000 posts, or almost 44% of the total. Notably, right-leaning pages also earned the most interactions -- over 2 billion, or 54%. Left-leaning pages earned over 1.1 billion interactions (31%) on nearly 300,000 election-related posts, while ideologically nonaligned pages earned nearly 560 million interactions (15%) on over 430,000 such posts.

A similar pattern occurred in the year before the insurrection, as right-leaning pages earned over 3.2 billion interactions on over 750,000 election-related posts created between January 6, 2020, and January 6, 2021 -- earning roughly 50% of total interactions on just over 40% of such posts. Left-leaning pages earned nearly 32% of total interactions on over 25% of election-related posts during this time, and ideologically nonaligned pages earned almost 18% of total interactions on nearly 25% of such posts.

Interactions on election-related posts from Facebook pages posting about U.S. political news before and after the Capitol insurrection

FAILURE: Facebook continues to platform numerous posts from right-leaning pages about “Stop the Steal”

In response to the January 6 Capitol attack, Facebook vowed to remove posts with the phrase “stop the steal” under its Coordinating Harm policy, including retroactive removal. However, Facebook used a very narrow interpretation of its policy, allowing many posts and groups with similar language about a “stolen election” to remain active on the platform. On January 28, 2020, Media Matters reported that over 150 Facebook groups focused on election fraud had avoided removal, including 23 groups that mentioned “stop the steal” or used similar language about a “stolen election” in their name or within posts.

A year after the January 6 attack, there are still posts with the phrase circulating on Facebook. In fact, we found at least 484 posts with “stop the steal” or “sts” that were created by right-leaning pages in the year before the riot -- between January 6, 2020, and January 6, 2021 -- that Facebook has failed to remove. These posts earned over 2.6 million interactions. Notably, the top 10 “Stop the Steal” posts from this time frame with the most interactions were either posted by Trump, his campaign, or right-wing outlet Newsmax. Five of these posts were from Trump and his campaign.

Donald Trump_facebook post_20201212

Donald Trump_facebook post_20210101

Donald Trump_facebook post_20201121

Team Trump_facebook post_20210106

Team Trump_facebook post_20210106

Additionally, between January 7 and December 31, 2021, right-leaning pages made 238 posts mentioning “stop the steal” or “sts,” which earned over 415,000 interactions combined. These include at least 40 posts that push election misinformation, criticize Facebook for banning the phrase, or contain misinformation about the insurrection.

Nick Adams_facebook post_20210210

Lance Wallnau_facebook post_20211122

Trey Gowdy_facebook post_20210521

Mindy Robinson_facebook post_20210323

LifeZette Faith_facebook post_20210112

Women for Trump_facebook post_20210111

FAILURE: There are still hundreds of groups filled with election misinformation on Facebook

Two days after Election Day 2020, it was clear that Facebook was already having problems. The platform took down one of the biggest “Stop the Steal” groups at approximately 300,000 members, and it added labels to posts discussing election results. However, like many of Facebook’s actions to stem misinformation, this was too little too late. By then, groups were proliferating on the platform, finding ways around Facebook’s moderation, and using the platform to organize and prepare for violence on January 6.

A year later, election misinformation continues to spread in private and public Facebook groups as administrators only gained more power to evade content moderation.

In October 2021, we identified 203 active groups dedicated to pushing election misinformation -- and that number has increased since then. As of January 3, there are still 203 groups spreading election misinformation and conspiracy theories, with nearly 240,000 members; 18 of them specifically use variations of “stop the steal” or mention a “stolen election” in their name. Another 15 groups spreading election misinformation during that time have since been archived -- meaning that members have access to posts in the groups but can no longer create new ones.

While some of these groups are still focused on the 2020 presidential election, others have pivoted to combat so-called “election fraud” in state-level elections. For example, “NJ Election Integrity Project” has spread misinformation about the 2021 gubernatorial race. It is perhaps Facebook's biggest failures that it has let misinformation about 2020 election seep into 2021 and beyond.

Methodology...

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/facebook/

facebook is facing an unprecedented lawsuit amid allegations that the social network "played a role in radicalizing a far-right supporter of the extremist Boogaloo movement" who is accused of murdering a federal security officer.

According to HuffPost, the lawsuit has been filed by the sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, the federal officer who died as a result of a fatal drive-by shooting. Back in 2020, Underwood was shot outside of an Oakland, Calif., federal courthouse while protecting it amid George Floyd civil rights protests.

U.S. federal prosecutors have charged a man identified as Steven Carrillo with Underwood's murder. However, Angela Underwood Jacobs, sister of the deceased officer, believes he is not the only one to blame for her brother's death. In the suit, filed California Superior Court, Jacobs included a statement accusing Facebook of being responsible for his death.

“Facebook bears responsibility for the murder of my brother. As the lawsuit alleges, Facebook knowingly promoted inflammatory and violent content, and connected extremists who plotted and carried out the killing of my brother,” Angela Underwood Jacobs said in a statement.

She added, “Facebook must be held responsible for the harm it has caused, not just to my family but so many others, by promoting extremist content and building extremist groups on its platform."

Underwood’s attorney Ted Leopold has also echoed similar sentiments. Speaking to ABC News, Leopold also accused the social media network of being "an 'active participant' in the extremism peddled on its social media site."

“They are recruiting people to come onto their sites, and once they are on their sites they use a lot of different algorithms that will bring like-minded individuals together,” Leopold told ABC News.

“We believe and intend to show that Facebook’s conduct has led to a rise in extremism throughout the world and acts of real-world violence, including the murder of Officer Underwood,” Leopold said....

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https://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-facebook-papers-how-to-read-the-reports/

...Here's a list of articles and videos on the Facebook Papers from a collection of news outlets that have seen the internal documents. Note that some of the articles may require a subscription to read.

The Associated Press

• Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users, Oct. 26
• Facebook language gaps weaken screening of hate, terrorism, Oct. 25
• Apple once threatened Facebook ban over Mideast maid abuse, Oct. 25
• People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within, Oct. 25
• Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India, Oct. 24
• Amid the Capitol riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection, Oct. 22

The Atlantic

• 'History Will Not Judge Us Kindly,' Oct. 25
• How Facebook Failed the World, Oct. 25
• What Happened When Facebook Became Boomerbook, Oct. 5

Bloomberg

• Facebook Hobbled Team Tasked With Stemming Harmful Content, Oct. 25
• Facebook Staff Say Core Products Make Misinformation Worse, Oct. 25
• Facebook Privately Worried About Hate Speech Spawning Violence, Oct. 25
• The Facebook Papers: Social Network Shaken by Content, User Woe, Oct. 25
• Facebook, Alarmed by Teen Usage Drop, Left Investors in the Dark, Oct. 25

CBS

• Liberals to 'Moscow Mitch,' conservatives to QAnon: Facebook researchers saw how its algorithms led to misinformation, Oct. 25
• Facebook internal documents show execs knew platform spread misinformation and failed to act at times, Oct. 25

-, Oct. 3

CNBC

• The Facebook Papers: Documents reveal internal fury and dissent over site's policies, Oct. 25

CNN

• Facebook has language blind spots around the world that allow hate speech to flourish, Oct. 26
• The Facebook Papers may be the biggest crisis in the company's history, Oct. 25
• Facebook knew it was being used to incite violence in Ethiopia. It did little to stop the spread, documents show, Oct. 25
• Facebook has known it has a human trafficking problem for years. It still hasn't fully fixed it, Oct. 25
• Revealed: How Facebook promoted QAnon to a 'North Carolina mom,' Oct. 25
• Not stopping 'Stop the Steal:' Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection, Oct. 24
• Messages show what employees were saying about Facebook's role in the insurrection, Oct. 23

The Financial Times

• Facebook bungled efforts to curb explosion of hate speech ahead of Capitol attack, Oct. 25
• Four revelations from the Facebook Papers, Oct. 25
• Employees pleaded with Facebook to stop letting politicians bend rules, Oct. 22
• Facebook confronts growth problems as number of young users in US declines, Oct. 22

Fox Business

• Facebook employees claimed tactics were 'hostile', 'disrespectful' toward users, document shows, Oct. 25
• Facebook aides say company fueled violence, Oct. 25

NBC

• The Facebook Papers: Documents reveal internal fury and dissent over site's policies, Oct. 25
• Internal Facebook documents reveal more red flags about misinformation on site, Oct. 25
• 'Carol's Journey': What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users, Oct. 22

The New York Times

• Facebook Wrestles With the Features It Used to Define Social Networking, Oct. 25
• The Facebook Papers and their Fallout, Oct. 25
• In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems, Oct. 23
• Internal Alarm, Public Shrugs: Facebook's Employees Dissect Its Election Role, Oct. 22

NPR

• What Facebook's internal documents reveal about the company, Oct. 25
• How the 'Stop the Steal' movement outwitted Facebook ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Oct. 22

Politico

• Facebook documents offer a treasure trove for Washington's antitrust war, Oct. 25
• 'This is NOT normal': Facebook employees vent their anguish, Oct. 25
• Facebook's Jan. 6 problem: A thin playbook for false election claims, Oct. 25
• How Facebook users wield multiple accounts to spread toxic politics, Oct. 25
• Facebook's 'fatal flaw': Staff spar over the sway of their lobbyists, Oct. 25
• Facebook did little to moderate posts in the world's most violent countries, Oct. 25
• Inside Facebook's struggle to contain insurrectionists' posts, Oct. 25

Reuters

• Facebook knew about, failed to police, abusive content globally - documents, Oct. 25

USA Today

• Facebook says it's stopping hate and violence against Black Americans. Its own research shows otherwise, Oct. 25
• The story of Carol and Karen: Two experimental Facebook accounts show how the company helped divide America, Oct. 23

The Wall Street Journal

• Facebook's Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making, Oct. 24
• Facebook Services Are Used to Spread Religious Hatred in India, Internal Documents Show, Oct. 23
• Facebook Increasingly Suppresses Political Movements It Deems Dangerous, Oct. 22
• The Facebook Files, Sept. 13

The Washington Post

• Five points for anger, one for a 'like': How Facebook's formula fostered rage and misinformation, Oct. 26
• The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook's CEO chose growth over safety, Oct. 25
• How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India, Oct. 25
• A whistleblower's power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers, Oct. 25
• Inside Facebook, Jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs, Oct. 22
• New whistleblower claims Facebook allowed hate, illegal activity to go unchecked, Oct. 22

The Verge

• The tier list: How Facebook decides which countries need protection, Oct. 25
• Facebook's lost generation, Oct. 25

Wired

• Facebook is Everywhere; Its Moderation is Nowhere Close, Oct. 25
• How to Fix Facebook, According to Facebook Employees, Oct. 25
• Facebook Failed the People who Tried to Improve It, Oct. 25

===

The story of Carol and Karen: Two experimental Facebook accounts show how the company helped divide America

Jessica Guynn and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY

October 25, 2021·

In 2019, two users joined Facebook. Both had similar interests: young children and parenting, Christianity, civics and community.

"Carol," 41, was a conservative from North Carolina. She was interested in news, politics, then-President Donald Trump and the nation's first family. She followed the official accounts for Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Fox News.

"Karen" was the same age and lived in the same state. But she was a liberal who liked politics, news and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She disliked Trump. She followed a local news site, pages about North Carolina and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.

Facebook's algorithms got to work, suggesting what they'd be interested in.

Accepting recommendations for sites supportive of Trump led Carol to suggestions for a site called “Donald Trump is Jesus,” and another for QAnon, a wide-ranging extremist ideology that alleges celebrities and top Democrats are engaged in a pedophile ring. Karen was presented with anti-Trump pages, including one that posted an image showing an anus instead of Trump's mouth.

The two women were not real. They were created by a Facebook researcher to explore how the social media platform deepened political divides in the U.S. by recommending content rife with misinformation and extremism.

Live updates: More on Facebook papers and the whistleblower testimony in the UK]

The experiment shows that Facebook, which had 2.9 billion monthly active users as of June 30, knew before the 2020 presidential election that its automated recommendations amplified misinformation and polarization in the U.S., yet the company largely failed to curtail its role in deepening the political divide.

Reports describing the experiments are among hundreds of documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by attorneys for Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 news organizations, including USA TODAY.

More: Facebook says it removes hate speech. Its own research says otherwise.]

In the summer of 2019, a Facebook researcher created two fictitious accounts with similar demographics but opposite political beliefs. Facebook's recommendation algorithm quickly suggested the users follow accounts on extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Jose Rocha said he's experienced the divisiveness firsthand.

A military veteran who grew up in a Democratic, pro-union family in Selah, Washington, Rocha said Facebook normalized racist views and led him down a rabbit hole to far-right ideologies.

For a time, Rocha said, he became a Nazi sympathizer and a backer of other extremist views – behavior he now blames on Facebook's recommendations system.

"I wouldn't have even known they existed if it wasn't for Facebook. So I wouldn't have went out seeking them," said Rocha, 27.

Bill Navari, 57, a conservative sports commentator from Pittsburgh, said a cousin blocked him on Facebook after he suggested she get her TDS ("Trump derangement syndrome") checked.

“I’ve seen people on Facebook saying, ‘If you are voting for Trump, unfriend me.' But I didn’t see anyone saying, ‘If you are voting for Biden, unfriend me,'” he said. “Facebook has become like oil and water, and never the two shall meet.”

These days, he steers clear of political debates on Facebook.

“I’ll post pics of my family, of my dog, where we went on vacation, and I stay in touch with the friends and family. But posting a meme or putting something on Facebook, it’s not going to change anyone’s mind,” he said. “I just think the conversation has become so coarse.”

Is Facebook to blame? “I don’t like pointing fingers without direct knowledge,” he said. “But I do think that Facebook is a party to this.”

The internal Facebook documents show how swiftly the platform's recommendation algorithms can amplify polarization by sending users to content full of misinformation and extremism.

The company's experiment with the hypothetical conservative user was called "Carol's Journey to QAnon." Within five days of going live on June 2, 2019, the user was barraged by "extreme, conspiratorial and graphic content," the researcher wrote.

One of the recommendations included an image labeling former President Barack Obama a "traitor" with a caption that read, "When we're done he'll claim Kenyan citizenship as a way to escape." (Despite racist claims to the contrary, Obama is a U.S. citizen.)

The report on the fictitious liberal user was called "Karen and the Echo Chamber of Reshares." That account went live on July 20, 2019. Within a week, Facebook's recommendations pivoted to "all anti-Trump content." Some recommendations came from a small Facebook group that had been flagged for "promoting illegal activity," the Facebook researcher wrote.

One image served to Karen showed then-first lady Melania Trump's face superimposed on the body of a bikini-clad woman kneeling on a bed. The caption read, "Melania Trump: Giving evangelicals something they can get behind."

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appears before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee at the Russell Senate Office Building on October 05, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profits over safety.

Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has blown the whistle on the company, is a former product manager who worked on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, focusing on elections. She had a front-row seat to the most divisive political events in recent memory, including the Jan. 6 insurrection in which Trump supporters tried to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win in the presidential election.

Concerned that Facebook was prioritizing profits over the well-being of its users, Haugen reviewed thousands of documents over several weeks before leaving the company in May.

The documents, some of which have been the subject of extensive reporting by The Wall Street Journal and CBS News' "60 Minutes," detail company research showing that toxic and divisive content is prevalent in posts boosted by Facebook and shared widely by users.,,,

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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/11/facebook-experiment-toxic-centrist-content/620731/

I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens

My new Facebook account had the most generic interests possible, and still it brought me to a place no one should ever have to go.

In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users down a rabbit hole of extreme and conspiratorial content. The employee set up a pair of fake profiles—for Trump-supporting “Carol Smith” and Bernie-loving “Karen Jones”—and then led each one down the path of least resistance, liking whichever groups and pages Facebook’s recommendation system served up. Not a huge surprise: It took less than a week for Carol to be pushed toward online communities dedicated to QAnon, and for Karen to be swamped by lewd anti-Trump material.

The details of this experiment were found among the thousands of documents shared with reporters last month by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen; “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” in particular, has featured heavily in coverage. But the mere existence of the rabbit hole wasn’t shocking in itself. In 2017, the reporter Ryan Broderick published a bloggy version of the same idea at BuzzFeed News: “I Made a Facebook Profile, Started Liking Right-Wing Pages, and Radicalized My News Feed in Four Days.” When that piece came out, Facebook responded, “This isn’t an experiment; it’s a stunt.” Now we know that Broderick’s stunt produced, if nothing else, a replicable result.

Carol’s journey, like Karen’s and Broderick’s, addressed specific, urgent questions about how Facebook might polarize and confuse American voters. Facebook’s fake accounts started out by liking Fox News and Donald Trump, or else Elizabeth Warren and MoveOn; the one created for BuzzFeed went with the Republican National Committee and then–White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Taken all together, they show how Facebook’s mechanics, left unchecked, can grab ahold of even the slightest political leaning and bend it to grotesque extremes.

But none of these experiments has that much to say about what might happen to a Facebook user who doesn’t care about politics at all. Let’s say you never gave the platform any hint about your ideology, or how you’ve ever voted, or whether you even have. Let’s say you made yourself as bland and centrist as you possibly could be, and then let the system do its algorithmic work. Would your account get pulled into some other kind of rabbit hole? And if it did, what would be waiting there?....By Kaitlyn Tiffan

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but no ampl algo?

ads basis of foodchain for facebook ND GGL

an 11 21

click eyeballs even mainstream  media

In an article published by Mother Jones on Thanksgiving 2021, journalist Monika Bauerlein describes Americans as feeling mentally "exhausted" because of **all the bad news**on top of bad news that they are being inundated with. And media outlets, Bauerlein stresses, are creating that climate of exhaustion because it is good for business.

Bauerlein, in her Mother Jones article, writes, "Are you part of the exhausted majority?.… So many people are tired of feeling like everything is a disaster, everything is at risk, and we'll never be done fighting with unvaccinated relatives over who gets to come to Thanksgiving. And tired, too, of the news. I'm a journalist who lives and breathes news, and I get tired. So many headlines that want to get your attention. So much to worry about. Democrats in disarray, inflation, the climate — it's all at 11, all the time."

Bauerlein acknowledges that "there are a lot of crises out there," but she is quick to add that the world has always had crises. The difference in 2021, she argues, is media outlets have a financial stake in promoting "outrage."

"This is obviously not the only time of crisis the world, or America, has ever been through," the journalist explains. "It is, however, the only one in which we have lived in a 24/7 media ecosystem that depends for a significant part of its business on instant reaction and instant outrage. If you've been reading Mother Jones for a little while, you know about the basic problem: Advertising revenue for publishers and broadcasters depends in large part on both quantity — clicks, eyeballs, video views — and engagement: how long you stick around, whether you share, whether you comment. And all of those metrics are juiced when content tugs at your emotions, especially fear and outrage."

Bauerlein continues, "That can take the form of sensational headlines about simple news stories, or it can take the form of opinionatedhot takes. Even for newsrooms that depend less on advertising than subscriptions, as the New York Times and the Washington Post do, quick-turnaround opinion content is key in getting people to subscribe. That's why you're seeing these prestige outlets add more and more columnists and associated newsletters." wapo pow roger pal

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military

no lnx

for The New York Times

By Paul Mozur

Oct. 15, 2018

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — They posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes as they flooded Facebook with their hatred. One said Islam was a global threat to Buddhism. Another shared a false story about the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man.

The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers and civilian officials in the country.

Members of the Myanmar military were the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that stretched back half a decade and that targeted the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, the people said. The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Human rights groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history.

While Facebook took down the official accounts of senior Myanmar military leaders in August, the breadth and details of the propaganda campaign — which was hidden behind fake names and sham accounts — went undetected. The campaign, described by five people who asked for anonymity because they feared for their safety, included hundreds of military personnel who created troll accounts and news and celebrity pages on Facebook and then flooded them with incendiary comments and posts timed for peak viewership.

Working in shifts out of bases clustered in foothills near the capital, Naypyidaw, officers were also tasked with collecting intelligence on popular accounts and criticizing posts unfavorable to the military, the people said. So secretive were the operations that all but top leaders had to check their phones at the door.

Facebook confirmed many of the details about the shadowy, military-driven campaign. The company’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said it had found “clear and deliberate attempts to covertly spread propaganda that were directly linked to the Myanmar military.”

On Monday, after questions from The New York Times, it said it had taken down a series of accounts that supposedly were focused on entertainment but were instead tied to the military. Those accounts had 1.3 million followers.

“We discovered that these seemingly independent entertainment, beauty and informational pages were linked to the Myanmar military,” the company said in its announcement.

The previously unreported actions by Myanmar’s military on Facebook are among the first examples of an authoritarian government’s using the social network against its own people. It is another facet of the disruptive disinformation campaigns that are unfolding on the site. In the past, state-backed Russians and Iranians spread divisive and inflammatory messages through Facebook to people in other countries. In the United States, some domestic groups have now adopted similar tactics ahead of the midterm elections.

“The military has gotten a lot of benefit from Facebook,” said Thet Swe Win, founder of Synergy, a group that focuses on fostering social harmony in Myanmar. “I wouldn’t say Facebook is directly involved in the ethnic cleansing, but there is a responsibility they had to take proper actions to avoid becoming an instigator of genocide.”

In August, after months of reports about anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook, the company acknowledged that it had been too slow to act in Myanmar. By then, more than 700,000 Rohingya had fled the country in a year, in what United Nations officials called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The company has said it is bolstering its efforts to stop such abuses.

“We have taken significant steps to remove this abuse and make it harder on Facebook,” Mr. Gleicher said. “Investigations into this type of activity are ongoing.”

The information committee of Myanmar’s military did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Myanmar military’s Facebook operation began several years ago, said the people familiar with how it worked. The military threw major resources at the task, the people said, with as many as 700 people on it.

They began by setting up what appeared to be news pages and pages on Facebook that were devoted to Burmese pop stars, models and other celebrities, like a beauty queen with a penchant for parroting military propaganda. They then tended the pages to attract large numbers of followers, said the people. They took over one Facebook page devoted to a military sniper, Ohn Maung, who had won national acclaim after being wounded in battle. They also ran a popular blog, called Opposite Eyes, that had no outward ties to the military, the people said.

Those then became distribution channels for lurid photos, false news and inflammatory posts, often aimed at Myanmar’s Muslims, the people said. Troll accounts run by the military helped spread the content, shout down critics and fuel arguments between commenters to rile people up. Often, they posted sham photos of corpses that they said were evidence of Rohingya-perpetrated massacres, said one of the people.

Digital fingerprints showed that one major source of the Facebook content came from areas outside Naypyidaw, where the military keeps compounds, some of the people said.

Some military personnel on the effort suffered from low morale, said two of the people, in part because of the need to spread unfounded rumors about people like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate and Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, to hurt their credibility. One hoax used a real photo of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi in a wheelchair and paired it with false suggestions that she had gone to South Korea for Botox injections, the people said.

The Facebook page of the sniper, Mr. Ohn Maung, offers one example of the military’s tactics. It gained a large following because of his descriptions of the day-to-day life of a soldier. The account was ultimately taken over by a military team to pump out propaganda, such as posts portraying Rohingya as terrorists, said two of the people.

One of the most dangerous campaigns came in 2017, when the military’s intelligence arm spread rumors on Facebook to both Muslim and Buddhist groups that an attack from the other side was imminent, said two people. Making use of the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, it spread warnings on Facebook Messenger via widely followed accounts masquerading as news sites and celebrity fan pages that “jihad attacks” would be carried out. To Muslim groups it spread a separate message that nationalist Buddhist monks were organizing anti-Muslim protests.

Image

A settlement for Rohingya arrivals in Thang Khali, Bangladesh. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in what United Nations officials have called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

A settlement for Rohingya arrivals in Thang Khali, Bangladesh. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in what United Nations officials have called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

The purpose of the campaign, which set the country on edge, was to generate widespread feelings of vulnerability and fear that could be salved only by the military’s protection, said researchers who followed the tactics.

Understanding the Coup in Myanmar

Card 1 of 5

A recent military coup. Following a military coup on Feb. 1, unrest has been growing. Peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations have given way to insurgent uprisings against the Tatmadaw, the country’s military, which ousted the country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is a polarizing figure. The daughter of a hero of Myanmar’s independence, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi remains very popular at home. Internationally, her reputation has been tarnished by her recent cooperation with the same military generals who ousted her.

The coup ended a short span of quasi-democracy. In 2011, the Tatmadaw implemented parliamentary elections and other reforms. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi came to power as state councillor in 2016, becoming the country’s de facto head of government.

The coup was preceded by a contested election. In the Nov. 8 election, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won 83 percent of the body’s available seats. The military, whose proxy party suffered a crushing defeat, refused to accept the results of the vote.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi faces years in prison. On Dec. 6, a court sentenced her to four years in a closed-door trial that the U.N. and foreign governments have described as politically motivated. While this initial sentence has since been reduced to two years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is facing a series of rulings that could keep her locked up for the rest of her life.

Facebook said it had found evidence that the messages were being intentionally spread by inauthentic accounts and took some down at the time. It did not investigate any link to the military at that point.

The military tapped its rich history of psychological warfare that it developed during the decades when Myanmar was controlled by a military junta, which gave up power in 2011. The goal then was to discredit radio broadcasts from the BBC and Voice of America. One veteran of that era said classes on advanced psychological warfare from 15 years ago taught a golden rule for false news: If one quarter of the content is true, that helps make the rest of it believable.

Some military personnel picked up techniques from Russia. Three people familiar with the situation said some officers had studied psychological warfare, hacking and other computer skills in Russia. Some would give lectures to pass along the information when they returned, one person said.

The Myanmar military’s links to Russia go back decades, but around 2000, it began sending large groups of officers to the country to study, said researchers. Soldiers stationed in Russia for training opened blogs and got into arguments with Burmese political exiles in places like Singapore.

The campaign in Myanmar looked similar to online influence campaigns from Russia, said Myat Thu, a researcher who studies false news and propaganda on Facebook. One technique involved fake accounts with few followers spewing venomous comments beneath posts and sharing misinformation posted by more popular accounts to help them spread rapidly.

Human rights groups focused on the Facebook page called Opposite Eyes, which began as a blog about a decade ago and then leapt to the social network. By then, the military was behind it, said two people. The blog provided a mix of military news, like hype about the purchase of new Russian fighter jets, and posts attacking ethnic minority groups like the Rohingya.

At times, according to Moe Htet Nay, an activist who kept tabs on it, the ties of the Opposite Eyes Facebook page to the military spilled into the open. Once, it wrote about a military victory in Myanmar’s Kachin State before the news became public. Below the post, a senior officer wrote that the information was not public and should be taken down. It was.

“It was very systematic,” said Mr. Moe Htet Nay, adding that other Facebook accounts reposted everything that the blog wrote, spreading its message further. Although Facebook has taken the page down, the hashtag #Oppositeyes still brings up anti-Rohingya posts.

Today, both Facebook and Myanmar’s civilian leaders said they were keenly aware of the power of the platform.

“Facebook in Myanmar? I don’t like it,” said Oo Hla Saw, a legislator. “It’s been dangerous and harmful for our democratic transition.”

===

...Tenpenny has been added to the Center for Countering Digital Hate's infamous**"disinformation dozen**," a group described as "12 people it said were responsible for spreading a majority of anti-vaxxer falsehoods on Facebook."

ref report

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_750e5af82aea4920a270b1c5a8b094c2.pdf

no lnx

KEY FINDINGS

Analysis of a sample of anti-vaxx content that was shared or posted on Facebook and

Twitter showed up to 65% of anti-vaccine content can be traced to the leading online

anti-vaxxers, who we label the Disinformation Dozen.

? Individuals were selected based upon their high social media followings and high

volume production of anti-vaccine content.

? Our sample of anti-vaccine content was shared or posted onFacebook or Twitter a

total of 812,000 times between February 1 and March 16 2021, with 65% of that

sample attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.

? In the last two months, our analysis of anti-vaxx content posted or shared to

Facebook 689,000 times shows that up to 73% of that content originates from

the leading anti-vaxxers included in this report.

? Analysis of 120,000 anti-vaccine tweets and shares during this period finds that

up to 17% feature the Disinformation Dozen.

Deplatforming repeat offenders is the most effective way of stopping the proliferation of

dangerous misinformation.

?The Disinformation Dozen -- including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Mercola, and

Ty and Charlene Bollinger, among others -- continually violate the terms of service

agreements on Facebook and Twitter. While some anti-vaxxers identified by

CCDH have been removed from a single platform, comprehensive action has yet to

be taken, and most remain active on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

? CCDH’s ongoing tracking of 425 anti-vaxx accounts finds that the total following

across platforms reached 59.2 million in December 2020, an increase of 877,000

since June

https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

===

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/facebook-facial-recognition/

but keep files/algo?

===

11 21 wokewash?

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/amid-public-debate-about-facebook-and-its-harms-company-has-spent-millions-misleading-ads

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/instagrams-suggestion-algorithm-promoting-accounts-share-misinformation

no lnx many pix

Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is promoting accounts that share misinformation

WRITTEN BY SPENCER SILVA

PUBLISHED 10/20/21

An Instagram feature that recommends accounts for users is pushing them down the misinformation rabbit hole.

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A Media Matters analysis found that Instagram’s “similar account suggestions” feature, a drop-down widget that appears on users’ profiles and suggests accounts to follow, reliably shepherds users who show an interest in anti-vaccine misinformation and other harmful content (some of which the platform claims to ban) toward similar types of content.

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Like other algorithm-driven features designed by Facebook, which owns Instagram, the feature steers users toward content they’re likely to interact with — thus keeping them on the platform longer. If a user follows NBA superstar Lebron James, for instance, the feature will suggest following other basketball stars like Stephen Curry or entertainers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or rapper Cardi B.

[pix]

Benign, right? Not so much.

In order to test how Instagram’s“similar account suggestions” workswhen users click on pages with less savory content, Media Matters created a new Instagram account and navigated to the pages of several well-known bad actors and scrutinized Instagram’s suggested follows. These bad actors included members of the “Disinformation Dozen,” influencers identified in a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the originators of an estimated 65% of vaccine misinformation spread on Facebook and Twitter.

The result: The platform’s algorithm repeatedly urged us to follow accounts spreading dangerous misinformation, including content that seems to violate Instagram’s stated policies against vaccine misinformation. It also led us to content it doesn't ban but supposedly does not promote, such as posts featuring exaggerated health claims.

For instance, when we demonstrated interest in anti-vaccine accounts by clicking on pages known to feature such content, Instagram suggested pages containing more anti-vaccine propaganda, including posts that the platform itself labeled as false. The same was true of pages hawking weight loss products and “natural cures for every disease.”

Instagram is recommending anti-vaccine accounts to its users

Despite Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s claims that the company removes anti-vax content — “we just take it off the platform entirely,” he said in a July interview — Instagram remains awash in anti-vaccine misinformation.

Anti-vaccine merchandise is widely available via Instagram Shopping. Influencers spreading health misinformation boast hundreds of thousands of followers. And when the platform does take action against these accounts, they usually return within days.

What’s more, Instagram is not only allowing anti-vaccine content to remain on the platform, but also actively promoting it.

Take, for instance, the account of osteopathic physician and anti-vaccine advocate Sherri Tenpenny, who has been removed from Instagram several times for spreading vaccine misinformation and hawking other dangerous ideas. In just the past few weeks, she’s promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Microsoft founder Bill Gates once proposed deadly vaccines as a way to reduce the global population. Tenpenny has also recently been fearmongering about toddlers dying from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine — although the Pfizer vaccine isn't approved for children under 16.

When we followed her, the top recommended account was an anti-vaccine account that promotes any number of false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, including the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips at Gates’ behest.

Earlier this summer, Media Matters documented Instagram’s suggestions when we followed accounts associated with seven members of the “Disinformation Dozen.” The top three most-recommended accounts included an anti-vaccine influencer who’s been removed from the platform several times and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine activist organization that is now banned on Instagram.

The “similar accounts suggestions” feature is also enabling local chapters of global anti-vaccine activist organizations to recruit members and fundraise via Instagram. For example, if a user follows the page for Freedom Keepers United, a popular anti-vaccine organization that has planned rallies against mask and vaccine mandates, Instagram guides them to dozens of local chapters of the organization. Many of these chapters use link-curating services like Linktree to sell merchandise and organize against vaccine mandates and other state-level policies.

“Similar account suggestions” feature is leading users to diet and weight loss gimmicks

In addition to promoting anti-vaccine pages, the “similar account suggestions” feature is also leading users to diet and health misinformation.

While most health misinformation isn’t explicitly banned from Instagram, the platform claims that it tries “to avoid recommending” “sensitive or low-quality content about Health or Finance.” This includes “content containing exaggerated health claims, such as ‘miracle cures’” and “content attempting to sell products or services based on health-related claims, such as promoting a supplement to help a person lose weight.”

Media Matters has previously shown that the platform recommends weight loss gimmicks through the “Explore” page. When we followed accounts that fit Instagram’s description of pages publishing low-quality health content, the platform recommended several pages selling “natural cures for every disease.”

Compared to other features on Facebook platforms, it’s easy to fix Instagram’s suggestions feature: Just get rid of it. In fact, users can already opt out of the feature in the app’s settings, which makes it clear that suggesting similar accounts isn't an essential function of the platform. But as The Wall Street Journal’s reporting has shown, the company will always choose profits over curbing misinformation.

THE LATEST

...

Cumulus Media gives a platform to some of radio’s biggest anti-vaccine peddlers despite its own vaccine mandate

10/22/21 3:10 PM EDT

Related

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04/28/21 12:59 PM EDT

Instagram Shopping is full of anti-vaccine merchandise

08/09/21 9:28 AM EDT

Instagram is recommending weight loss gimmicks through the “Explore” page

09/22/21 3:58 PM EDT

===

===

https://theconversation.com/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testified-that-the-companys-algorithms-are-dangerous-heres-how-they-can-manipulate-you-169420

Fo:{rmer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “}:{.”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.”}:

Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.

Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.

As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.

From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook

The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.

Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.

Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.

Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.

Not everything viral deserves to be

Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.

Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.

A primer on the Facebook algorithm.[vid?]

On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”

We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.

Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.

Not-so-wise crowds

We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.

We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.

The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.

First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.

Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.

Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.

People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks. They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once. They have even altered the structure of social networks to create illusions about majority opinions.

Dialing down engagement

What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.

It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.

===

https://theconversation.com/facebooks-own-internal-documents-offer-a-blueprint-for-making-social-media-safer-for-teens-169080

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-tweaked-its-news-feed-algorithm-and-right-leaning-pages-are-reaping-benefits

no lnx many grafix

acebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm, and right-leaning pages are reaping the benefits

Facebook’s algorithm allows right-leaning pages to outperform other political pages with videos that often push or lead to sensational and divisive content

WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CARLY EVANS, NENA BEECHAM & JEREMY TUTHILL

PUBLISHED 10/08/21

Right-leaning news and politics pages on Facebook continue to outperform nonaligned and left-leaning pages in 2021. These pages have used the company’s algorithm, which rewards sensational content, to earn billions of interactions in 2021; those large numbers are due to the performance of posts containing videos, which drew nearly three times as many average interactions as posts with links.

An earlier Media Matters study of engagement during 2020 among news and politics-related Facebook pages found that right-leaning pages consistently earned more interactions on the platform than ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages. Even after Facebook slightly tweaked the algorithm last year, our findings suggest that the change has not affected right-leaning pages, which often post sensational content. This study is one of many from Media Matters and others that have demonstrated again and again that there is no bias or censorship against conservatives on Facebook, despite claims to the contrary.

In our latest study, Media Matters used CrowdTangle data to compile and analyze millions of posts from right-leaning, left-leaning, and ideologically nonaligned Facebook pages that were posted between January 1 and September 21, 2021. We found that right-leaning pages consistently earned more interactions than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages in both 2020 and 2021. Key findings include:

Between January 1 and September 21, right-leaning pages earned the most interactions, roughly 4.7 billion, even though they posted less than other political and news-related pages. In fact, right-leaning pages accounted for roughly 47% of interactions and only 26% of posts from all political and news-related pages and consistently earned the most daily engagement throughout our study period, with the exception of only four days.

During the same time frame, ideologically nonaligned pages earned far fewer (3.1 billion, 31%) interactions than right-leaning pages, even though they posted the most, accounting for over 60% of posts. Left-leaning pages posted the least (under 14%) and earned the smallest share of interactions (22%).

Seven of the top 10 political and news-related pages with the most interactions so far this year were right-leaning pages, and five of these were also among the top 10 in 2020.

Right-leaning pages earned more average interactions per post with video in 2021 than they had the previous year, while ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages earned less.

Of the top 100 posts between January 1 and September 21 from right-leaning Facebook pages, 82 were videos, earning roughly 120 million interactions. Of these videos, 59 were native videos from The

Epoch Times’s Facebook pages, which often post seemingly innocuous videos that can act as a bridge for users to reach its more extreme content.

Jump to section...

RIGHT-LEANING PAGES CONSISTENTLY EARNED MORE ENGAGEMENT ON THEIR POSTS THIS YEAR COMPARED WITH LEFT-LEANING AND IDEOLOGICALLY NONALIGNED PAGES -- A SIMILAR PATTERN AS IN 2020

HALF OF THE TOP 10 POLITICAL AND NEWS-RELATED PAGES IN 2021 ARE RIGHT-LEANING PAGES THAT WERE ALSO AMONG THE TOP 10 IN 2020

RIGHT-LEANING PAGES EARNED NEARLY THREE TIMES MORE AVERAGE INTERACTIONS FOR VIDEO CONTENT THAN POSTS CONTAINING LINKS -- AND FAR MORE THAN OTHER POLITICAL AND NEWS-RELATED PAGES

AVERAGE INTERACTIONS EARNED PER VIDEO POST BY RIGHT-LEANING PAGES INCREASED FROM 2020 TO 2021. THE SAME FOR IDEOLOGICALLY NONALIGNED AND LEFT-LEANING PAGES DECREASED.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA OUTLET THE EPOCH TIMES EARNED SIGNIFICANT ENGAGEMENT ON SEEMINGLY INNOCUOUS VIDEOS, WHICH CAN BE A BRIDGE TO MORE EXTREME CONTENT

METHODOLOGY

On September 15, The Wall Street Journal published the third article in a series of investigative reports about how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company. This new report highlighted that in 2018, Facebook implemented a change to its News Feed algorithm that gave more weight to “meaningful social interactions” (MSI), particularly shares and comments. According to Facebook, part of the goal was to reverse a decline in comments and other forms of engagement -- a pattern the platform had seen in 2017 -- and to encourage more original posting. Later in the year, company researchers discovered that publishers were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism to produce more comments and reactions. The company concluded that the new algorithm’s heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed led to “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content” being “inordinately prevalent among reshares.”

Even though the algorithm promoted sensational content, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often resisted -- and sometimes outright denied -- tweaks to the algorithm that would address the proliferation of false and divisive content, but hurt the company’s bottom line. In other words, more engagement and time spent on the platform was better for business -- regardless of the consequences. Publicly, Facebook has tried to minimize the importance of engagement, particularly on posts with links, but as the Journal reports, “Engagement is viewed inside the company as an important sign for the health of the business.”

The company reportedly did slightly adjust the algorithm in the spring of 2020, reducing an aspect of the algorithm called “downstream MSI” for content with civic and health information, after early tests indicated that such a change would reduce the proliferation of false content. However, based on our findings, this has not affected right-leaning pages, which often post sensational content -- including misinformation about U.S. elections and the COVID-19 pandemic -- and have continued to earn more engagement than other political and news-related pages, particularly on their video content.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, has confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s reporting and filed eight whistleblower complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that Facebook is hiding research from investors and the public.

Right-leaning pages consistently earned more engagement on their posts this year compared with left-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages -- a similar pattern as in 2020

In a previous study of engagement for political and news-related Facebook pages, Media Matters found that right-leaning pages earned the most interactions in 2020, with nearly 9 billion interactions on roughly 2.3 million posts. The right-leaning pages accounted for 45% of total interactions -- and less than 30% of total posts -- from right-leaning, left-leaning, and ideologically nonaligned pages overall. Ideologically nonaligned pages accounted for less than 30% of total interactions even though they accounted for over 55% of total posts. Left-leaning pages had the fewest posts and the least engagement, with only 25% of total interactions and 16% of total posts.

So far, these pages have followed a similar pattern in 2021, with right-leaning pages earning the most engagement, ideologically nonaligned pages posting the most, and left-leaning pages posting the least and earning the least engagement.

Between January 1 and September 21, right-leaning pages earned roughly 4.7 billion interactions on over 1.3 million posts, accounting for roughly 47% of interactions and only 26% of posts. Nonaligned pages earned 3.1 billion interactions on over 3.2 millions posts, accounting for only 31% of the interactions and over 60% of the posts. Left-leaning pages earned nearly 2.2 billion interactions on less than 720,000 posts, accounting for 22% of the interactions and 14% of the posts.

Engagement data on content from Facebook pages that post about US political news

Right-leaning pages have consistently earned the most engagement so far in 2021, with the exception of just four days: January 6 and 7, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol; January 20, the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration; and February 1, when ideologically nonaligned pages earned slightly more engagement than right-leaning ones.

Total daily interactions on content from Facebook pages that post about US political news

Half of the top 10 political and news-related pages in 2021 are right-leaning pages that were also among the top 10 in 2020

Even though Facebook reportedly tweaked its algorithm in the spring of last year, the same high-performing right-leaning pages from 2020 were still among the top pages in 2021.

So far this year, seven of the top 10 political and news-related pages with the most interactions were right-leaning pages. Five of these seven right-leaning pages were also among the top 10 in 2020, including the pages for The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Fox host Dan Bongino, Daily Mail, and Breitbart.

The top 10 pages that earned the most interactions between January 1 and September 21 were:

1. Ben Shapiro, a right-leaning page which earned nearly 392 million interactions on nearly 25,000 posts.

Occupy Democrats, a left-leaning page which earned over 280 million interactions on over 10,000 posts.

Fox News, a right-leaning page which earned nearly 275 million interactions on over 12,000 posts.

Dan Bongino, a right-leaning page which earned nearly 208 million interactions on over 6,000 posts.

Daily Mail, a right-leaning page which earned over 166 million interactions on nearly 35,000 posts.

UNICEF, an ideologically nonaligned page which earned over 156 million interactions on over 1,000 posts. (UNICEF has partnered with Facebook for public health education, and Facebook’s info panel has been boosting the page’s posts.)

Breitbart, a right-leaning page with over 150 million interactions on over 13,000 posts.

Newsmax, a right-leaning page with over 130 million interactions on over 15,000 posts.

CNN, an ideologically nonaligned pagewith nearly 130 million interactions on over 14,000 posts.

10  Trending World by The Epoch Times, a right-leaning page with more than 117 million interactions on nearly 9,000 posts.

In comparison to 2020, there are two new right-leaning pages in this year’s top 10 list: Newsmax and Trending World by The Epoch Times. Newsmax’s newfound popularity on Facebook seems to follow a similar trend as its viewership, which increased as former President Donald Trump simultaneously promoted the right-wing outlet and criticized Fox News during his final months in office, while Trending World by The Epoch Times appears to have found success by promoting video-based content in accordance with Facebook’s tweaked algorithm.

Right-leaning pages earned nearly three times more average interactions for video content than posts containing links -- and far more than other political and news-related pages

Facebook often focuses on how posts with links are used to spread misinformation, but photos and videos posted by right-leaning pages also spread sensational, false, and divisive content. 

Between January 1 and September 21, right-leaning pages earned nearly 2.3 billion interactions on roughly 1 million posts with links -- or roughly 2,300 average interactions per post.

During the same time frame, right-leaning pages earned nearly three times more average interactions per post with video than per post with links. Roughly 188,000 posts with videos from right-leaning pages -- including native videos, live videos, and YouTube videos -- earned over 1.2 billion interactions, or nearly 6,500 average interactions per post.

In fact, of the top 100 posts from right-leaning Facebook pages in 2021, 82 were posts with native video, earning roughly 120 million interactions, including posts from Donald Trump Jr., Fox News host Sean Hannity, and other conservative voices that featured sensational content: [VIDS]

Sean Hannity_facebook post_20210530

Benny Johnson_facebook post_20210511

Don Jr_facebook post_20210120

Don Jr_facebook post_20210119

While ideologically nonaligned pages posted the most links and videos during the studied time period, it was right-leaning pages that earned the most interactions for each of these post types. Most notably, right-leaning pages accounted for roughly 30% of all posts with videos from political and news-related pages, but they earned nearly 60% of the interactions.

Proportion of posts with links and proportion of interactions for these posts:

Ideological breakdown of posts with links (and interactions earned) on Facebook pages posting about politics_updated

Proportion of posts with videos and proportion of interactions for these posts:

Ideological breakdown of posts with videos (and interactions earned) on Facebook pages posting about politics_update

Average interactions earned per video post by right-leaning pages increased from 2020 to 2021. The same for ideologically nonaligned and left-leaning pages decreased.

Right-leaning pages earned more average interactions per post with video than other political and news-related pages in both 2020 and 2021. In fact, right-leaning pages earned nearly 6,500 interactions per post with video in 2021, which is more than the average 5,600 interactions per post with video in 2020.

Comparatively, nonaligned pages and left-leaning pages both earned less average interactions per post with video in 2021 than the previous year. Left-leaning pages earned roughly 2,000 interactions per post with video, less than half of the 4,200 interactions per post with video earned in 2020. Ideologically nonaligned pages earned roughly 1,800 interactions per post with video in 2021, slightly less than the 2,000 interactions per post with video in 2020.

Right-wing media outlet The Epoch Times earned significant engagement on seemingly innocuous videos, which can be a bridge to more extreme content

Of the top 100 posts from right-leaning Facebook pages this year, 53 were native videos from two Facebook pages affiliated with right-wing media outlet The Epoch Times, which has often spread pro-Trump conspiracy theories alongside its affiliate New Tang Dynasty (NTD). Its Facebook pages The Epoch Times and Trending World by The Epoch Times have roughly 15 million combined followers, and these 53 videos earned over 82 million interactions.

Between January 1 and September 21, the two pages posted nearly 20,000 times, and 62% of those posts featured links. Links to articles from the right-wing media outlet included pro-Trump talking points, misleading and false COVID-19 and vaccine information, election misinformation, misleading information about the January 6 insurrection, and anti-Biden talking points.

Notable posts with sensational and false content from The Epoch Times include:

The Epoch Times_facebook post_20210923

The Epoch Times_facebook post_20210107_2

The Epoch Times_facebook post_20210107_3

The Epoch Times_facebook post_20210918

The Epoch Times_facebook post_20210502

While the majority of posts from these two Facebook pages included links, nearly all of their interactions -- over 195 million, or more than 95% of total engagement -- were earned on posts with videos (native videos, live videos, and YouTube videos). In fact, seven of the top 20 posts from all political and news-related pages during the same time frame were seemingly innocuous videos from The Epoch Times’ two pages. These videos earned hundreds of millions of views. However, these videos can easily lead users to more extreme content from The Epoch Times, including misinformation, if they follow links in other posts on the pages.

Trending World by The Epoch Times_facebook video_20210615

Over 3.7 million interactions and 39 million views

Trending World by The Epoch Times_facebook video_20210720

Over 3.5 million interactions and 78 million views

The Epoch Times_facebook video_20210629

Over 3.4 million interactions and 93 million views

Methodology

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.

For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.

The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list between January 1 and September 21, 2021. We reviewed data for these posts, including total interactions (reactions, comments, and shares), post type, and video views.

10/08/21 6:58 PM EDT

Angelo Carusone talks to The New Abnormal podcast about how Facebook is complicit in spreading right-wing media lies

1...

Related

With its “cross check” program, Facebook knowingly allowed right-wing politicians and media personalities to abuse its platform — just to avoid bad press

09/16/21 11:21 AM EDT

Facebook reportedly tweaked its algorithm but it failed to decrease engagement on ideologically aligned pages

12/01/20 3:49 PM EST

Conservatives spent 2020 accusing Facebook of being biased against them, but engagement data tells a different story

01/02/21 1:10 PM EST

===

an 1021 no lnx

America is sleepwalking towards fascism

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 08, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:{:{}:

}:

And yet ... nothing substantive is being done.

:{:{}:

}:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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harv 2017 taLK

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/elizabeth-warren-facebook/

no lnx tet

Elizabeth Warren was right about Facebook all along

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 05, 2021

The timing couldn't have been more dramatic when Facebook and its other popular products, including WhatsApp and Instagram, went down for over five hours on Monday. The worldwide outage happened between Sunday's dramatic unveiling of whistleblower Frances Haugen on "60 Minutes" and Haugen's scheduled Senate testimony on Tuesday. The hearing is looking at the negative social impacts of Facebook and its other apps. The company attributed Monday's outage to technical problems. Still, the event functioned as a formidable reminder of how much power Facebook has over the lives of billions of people around the world.

"The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company's services have become to daily life," Raymond Zhong of the New York Times writes, adding that Facebook and its many apps "are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns [and] responding to emergencies" around the entire planet.

The social media outage didn't just make it harder to peruse your high school sweetheart's Facebook wedding photos or linger overlong on some of the more embarrassing thirst traps you follow on Instagram. As people trying to shop online or use subscription services were reminded, a huge percentage of sites use Facebook as a login program. In some parts of the world, Facebook and WhatsApp stand in for phone service, thereby serving as the main way people communicate with family members, many social services and businesses. Some businesses, such as food vendors, do all of their sales through Facebook-owned platforms.

This illustration of Facebook's power was likely a coincidence, but it's still chilling in light of what the Washington Post reports as Facebook's changed P.R. approach, which comes in the face of Haugen dumping a ton of documents revealing that the company has been aware of how much social damage it causes, but doesn't care because it's profitable.

"Facebook is approaching its latest controversy over political polarization and the toxic effects of social media in a more aggressive and defiant way than it has previously," Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg write. Instead of the usual Facebook response to controversy, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg offers a hand-wringing apology and an empty promise to change, this time "the company has deployed a slate of executives to mount a public defense."

The lesson of Monday's outage is not that the world is too in the thrall of Facebook to do anything to fight back against its abuses, but the opposite. It's an illustration that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as usual, is right: It's time to break up Big Tech.

Warren launched her war on Facebook in the spring of 2019, during her campaign to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. While her proposal to take on Silicon Valley addressed other behemoths like Amazon and Google, her campaign deliberately made Facebook the face of tech's monopoly problem by running ads on Facebook calling out the company's "vast power over our economy and our democracy." It was a smart move, betting that the company would react in an infantile manner. Sure enough, Facebook took down (and then swiftly restored) the ads, giving Warren an opportunity to draw attention to "their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power."

Warren's plan to break up Big Tech was complex, involving both legislative and executive action. The former has no more chance of getting through the obstinate filibuster defense of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona than any other meaningful legislation to save democracy. But the latter plan, to unleash federal regulators who will aggressively enforce existing antitrust laws against Big Tech companies, has gained traction, and in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 48 states filed suit against Facebook, accusing the company of maintaining "its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire."

Looking out at the international damage done by a mere five-hour shortage of Facebook's services proves the point of the lawsuit. As the New York Times reported, some people were literally unable to communicate with health care workers and some businesses lost total contact with customers because Facebook products have so completely monopolized communications in their communities. Warren accused Big Tech of using "their resources and control over the way we use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation," but even she probably didn't imagine that the problem is so serious that an empanada seller in Colombia would lose a day of sales without WhatsApp.

Warren responded to the Facebook controversies and the outage on Monday with concision:

But TMZ, of all outlets, got a little more out of Warren, asking her about Haugen's "60 Minutes" appearance and testimony.

"She's trying to save our democracy," Warren told the TMZ reporter, with regards to Haugen. "And she recognizes the kind of threat that Facebook poses."

Tuesday's hearing featuring Haugen is focused on the rather narrow question of the dangers that Facebook presents to kids. Haugen is the source of internal documents published by the Wall Street Journal showing that Facebook is well aware that Instagram increases depression and anxiety among teenage girls, who often obsessively compare themselves to the impossible ideals of beauty promoted on the app.

Monday's outage can hopefully help beef up the FTC case against Facebook. The original case was thrown out in June by a federal judge who argued that it wasn't strong enough. Federal regulators didn't give up, though, and are putting together a more extensive case arguing that Facebook failed "to compete with new innovators" like Instagram and WhatsApp, so instead "bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat."

It's suddenly a lot harder to deny the negative impacts of such anti-competitive practices. There was, quite literally, an international communications breakdown across a number of apps on Monday simply because Facebook had an outage. The situation is made worse by the fact that all these different apps are governed by the irresponsible attitudes that Haugen is now detailing publicly.

More competition won't change the market forces that drive right-wingers to spread disinformation or cause teenage girls to worry about body image, but it could make it easier to pressure companies to do better by their customers. Right now, Facebook can afford this "f*** you!" stance because, for much of the world, they're the only game in town. Until that changes, there's no hope of making Facebook act more responsibly.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-letting-trumps-pac-run-ads-implying-he-true-president

Less than nine months into his suspension on Facebook, former President Donald Trump is using his political action committee to run ads on the platform containing election misinformation, including claiming “the election was tainted” and implying that Trump is “the true president.”

In June, Facebook announced Trump’s suspension from the platform for at least two years, citing his “acts of incitement” and claiming the suspension would “be significant enough to be a deterrent to Mr. Trump and others from committing such severe violations in future.” That same month, Trump’s Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, a joint venture between his Make America Great Again PAC and his newer Save America l**eadership PAC**, started sponsoring Facebook ads.

Kyle Tharp’s newsletter FWIW, which tracks digital spending and strategy in politics, reported on September 24 that the latest ads from Trump’s PAC attempt to undermine the U.S. election process and contain misinformation about the 2020 election, even suggesting that Trump is “the true president.”...

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alt spell ~

twt pix plus analysis

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/anti-vax-facebook/

...The government wants more people dead!

The government wants people to take a vaccine, that would mean less people dead!

The government is, uh, confused.

Much like Qanon, these people have created a world in which heads, they win, tails we lose. Cases up? It's the government and hospitals killing people. Cases down? It's because people are avoiding hospitals and taking Ivermectin.

Someone got sick, was hospitalized, and pulled through? God is great! She healed because god. Someone got sic, was hospitalized, and died? God is great! She got her angel wings and got called home because Jesus needed her more.

COVID is a scam! But also, COVID is a Chinese communist plot! And also, COVID is a media creation to make Donald Trump look bad!

Oh, and they all have immune systems! Because immune systems have never been circumvented by deadly pathogens. But wait, they got sick? Prayer warriors assemble!

Seriously, I might have more respect for these yokels if they could come up with a single cohesive and logical narrative, rather than this "throw everything against the wall and fuck it, let's go with all of it because why not?" bullshit.

And in the middle if it all, Facebook facilitates the spread of this misinformation, helping kill thousands every day. Conservative conspiracy mongering and Facebook are a marriage made in hell, and for once, conservatives aren't being protected from their own stupidity. They are actively participating in their own destruction, as they point and laugh at everyone—including us liberals!—trying to save their lives.

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exxon greenwash desmog

The report focuses on the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron, leaving out state-controlled oil giants like Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.

InfluenceMap examined the extent to which each company’s branding efforts and advertising campaigns focused on climate change.

Shell's branded content about its emissions scenario in The New York Times

Shell’s branded content about its “Sky” emissions scenario in The New York Times.

“The research suggests that Total maintains the highest proportion of its branding activities on climate (29 percent),” the new report finds. “Following this, ExxonMobil, which has faced significant negative media attention in 2018, allocates 19 percent. Shell and BP followed with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively. Chevron appears far less concerned, using approximately 2 percent of its branding budget on climate issues in 2018.”

The think tank’s research also looked at what the companies were saying to government regulators, either directly or through industry groups funded by the oil majors.

“Since Paris, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil have led in opposition to a range of climate-motivated policy stands,” InfluenceMap wrote. “For example, in 2018 both BP and Chevron have directly lobbied U.S. policymakers for a rollback on U.S. methane requirements.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the major constituent in natural gas.)

The report credits Shell and Total for becoming “more positive on a number of climate policy issues” since 2015, but adds that they “continue to support policies that will extend the role for fossil fuels in the energy mix and remain part of highly climate-oppositional trade associations.”

Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups

At times, the public stances of a corporation’s leadership stand starkly at odds with the messages from industry groups funded by that same corporation.

For example, on electric vehicles, Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden had a very direct and simple message in July 2018. “We need battery electric vehicles,” he said. And a year earlier, at the oil industry conference, CERAWeek, in 2017, he expressed support for “regulations that speed up investment in low carbon technologies and ? at the same time ? move consumer demand.”

Oil and gas lobbying on climate policies through trade associations. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

In May 2018, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade group for oil and gas, pushed the U.S. Congress to move in the opposite direction by rolling back incentives for electric vehicles.

“American Petroleum Institute (API) opposes mandates and subsidies,” API testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, according to InfluenceMap’s new report. The fossil fuel trade group voiced its opposition for subsidies for electric vehicles, adding that “the level of market penetration achieved by electric vehicles should not rely on government interference.”

The report also notes the difficulty in tracking corporate lobbying in the U.S. given the rise of so-called “dark money” groups and the lack of transparency surrounding political contributions in the U.S. “Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539 [million] in the 2018 election cycle according to OpenSecrets.org,” the report says.

Social Influencers

InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies usedsocial media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.

“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

All of this spending has implications for shareholders, InfluenceMap observed — and some shareholder groups appear to be listening.

“InfluenceMap’s research confirms a widely held suspicion that Big Oil’s glossy sustainability reports and shiny climate statements are all rhetoric and no action,” Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction, a UK charity focused on responsible investment, said in a statement accompanying the report. “These companies have mastered the art of corporate doublespeak — by boasting about their climate credentials while quietly using their lobbying firepower to sabotage the implementation of sensible climate policy and pouring millions into groups that engage in dirty lobbying on their behalf.”

DeSmog has reached out to ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron for comment....

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/its-**cross-check-program**-facebook-knowingly-allowed-right-wing-politicians-and-media

kid killer teen suicide?

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

salon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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guk

....SCL Elections and five connected companies ceased trading in 2018 following revelations in the Observer about its role in harvesting data about millions of voters from social media sites such as Facebook, for use by Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

Cambridge Analytica was found to have used the data to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

The fallout from the scandal included a scathing report by the House of Commons digital, culture media and sport select committee, which labelled Facebook “digital gangsters” who had tried to obstruct the MPs’ inquiry and had done little to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

Facebook also agreed to pay a record $5bn (£3.9bn) fine in the US, as well as a £500,000 fine – the highest possible – to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office over the scandal.

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https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc0553604720b7137f8663366ee5.pdf

Disinformation Dozen are responsible for up to 65% of antivaccine content At the outset of this research, we identified a dozen individuals who appeared to be extremely influential creators of digital anti-vaccine content. These individuals were selected either because they run anti-vaccine social media accounts with large numbers of followers, because they produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or because their growth was accelerating rapidly at the outset of our research in February. Full profiles of each are available at the end of this report.

1. Joseph Mercola 2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger 4. Sherri Tenpenny 5. Rizza Islam 6. Rashid Buttar 7. Erin Elizabeth 8. Sayer Ji 9. Kelly Brogan 10. Christiane Northrup 11. Ben Tapper 12. Kevin Jenkins

TheDisinformation Dozen are responsible for up to 65% of anti-vaccine contentOur analysis of over 812,000 posts extracted from Facebook and Twitter between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen...

==

...Our previous report, The Disinformation Dozen, found that up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on social media originates from just 12 individuals, was raised with social media company CEOs at a Congressional hearing on 25 March 2021. The findings of the report were also raised with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram by Senators Klobuchar and Luján, by Senator Warner and 12 state attorneys general. • Social media platforms have not taken action on the Disinformation Dozen: ten remain on Facebook and Twitter, and nine remain on Instagram. • In the month since publication of the Disinformation Dozen report, 105 posts from the accounts remaining on social media have breached the platforms’ stated policies for disinformation.

They include posts falsely linking Covid vaccines to thousands of deaths, conspiracies claiming COVID was lab-engineered, posts describing masks on youngsters as “child abuse”, and posts suggesting that the vaccine makes women infertile. •

The Disinformation Dozen – including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Ty and Charlene Bollinger – have repeatedly violated Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s policies. While some have been removed from a single platform, most remain active on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. • We estimate that the anti-vaccine disinformation posted by these 12 individuals and their organisations in the past month has been seen up to 29 million times. • Facebook, Instagram and Twitter must do what they promised and remove the remaining accounts of the Disinformation Doz...

:{:{disinformation Dozen:}:

The Sequel}:

How Big Tech is failing to act on leading anti-vaxxers despite bipartisan calls from Congress

​

Appearing before Congress in March, tech CEOs promised to act on twelve anti-vaxxers who are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media. One month on, our report shows that Big Tech has failed to act, allowing the spread of vaccine disinformation that has been viewed up to 29 million times.

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an 721

no lnx

The New York Times profiles 'most influential' purveyor of online COVID vaccine misinformation

Dartagnan and Daily Kos July 25, 2021

Many of us who maintain a social media presence have at least one acquaintance, "Facebook friend" or real-life, actual friend who has in the past year shared some type of official-sounding, medical jargon-laden post questioning the value of the COVID-19 vaccines — or worse, directly asserting or implying that such vaccines are ineffective, harmful, deadly, or will lead to untold health problems.

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_750e5af82aea4920a270b1c5a8b094c2.pdf

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.S./UK non-profit dedicated to fighting online disinformation and hate, nearly two-thirds of the anti-vaccine propaganda peddled in online forums and social media can be traced to exactly twelve individuals, colloquially labelled the "Disinformation Dozen." If you are someone who spends a significant time in social media forums, the chances are high that you have seen, scrolled through or otherwise had some awareness of their activity online, be it in your local school board's Facebook feed or other community sounding boards where supposedly informed individuals trade opinions and information.

According to the New York Times, and as confirmed in the CCDH's comprehensive report profiling these individuals, the number one purveyor of this vaccine misinformation is a gentleman named Joseph Mercola, described by the Times as an osteopathic physician. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he currently headquarters his company in the state of Florida, which, as USA Today's Nada Hassanein illustrates, is rapidly emerging as the nation's predominant "hotspot" for spiking COVID-19 infections, almost entirely among those who have refused to be vaccinated against the virus.

On Saturday the Times' Sheera Frankel profiled Dr. Mercola and cited multiple examples of his work, beginning with an article he published that appeared on Facebook in February. As Frankel reports, that article, clocking in at 3400 words, "declared coronavirus vaccines were "a medical fraud" and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease." The article (now deleted by Facebook) purportedly claimed that COVID-19 vaccines "alter[ed] your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch." Spread by other anti-vaccine activists and translated into multiple languages, these assertions eventually reached 400,000 Facebook viewers.

Mercola, described as an "internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens," has, according to Frankel's reporting, published approximately 600 articles on Facebook since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement," said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. "He's a master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement."

As the vaccination effort in this country approaches what can charitably be described as peak acceptance, the focus of many in the media has justifiably been on such political propaganda outlets such as Fox News, whose motivation for disseminating such lies can be attributed to political ends. It has become increasingly obvious, however, that many of those who refuse to be vaccinated (and thus contribute to the spread of COVID-19 through mutations such as the current delta variant) are having their political preconceptions against vaccinations reinforced through pseudo-medical misinformation they read online.

Several of the individuals profiled in the USA Today article (linked above via Yahoo News) illustrate the huge role social media has taken in fueling and perpetuating the COVID-19 pandemic in this country. As one physician in Florida's Calhoun county -- one of the epicenters of the recent surge in the state's COVID cases, with a current vaccination rate of only 23% -- observes, it is virtually impossible to dissuade people from believing something they read on social media about these vaccines, particularly when it carries the imprimatur of medical expertise.

"We're a small community. We all know people who passed away from COVID. When someone passes away, it's people we know," Davis said. "But I still don't feel like that overrides what people have seen on social media."

Davis has heard it all – from the myths that the vaccine will turn people magnetic to the virus being a hoax. She tries to quell fears, countering the false claims with research and data but patients often shut the conversation down.

The responses she and other medical providers in Florida hear from people who refuse the vaccine typically include assertions that the vaccines are untested, "experimental", and that there is too much contradictory information about them online. Significantly, some of these opinions are being influenced by medical providers themselves; one gentleman quoted in the USA Today article was told by his wife, a registered nurse, that "the vaccines hadn't been studied enough."

As Frankel's article points out, the general scientific and medical illiteracy most of the US population provides the perfect breeding ground for purveyors and profiteers of unreliable information. Mercola is a case in point:

[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don't work, Dr. Mercola's posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance.

According to Frankel's article, Mercola, who originally practiced in Illinois, began in the 1990's to shift his practice towards alternative medicine and promoting natural health cures and treatments. A prolific author, he has even had a book on the New York Times' bestseller list. As his fame (and wealth) have increased, he has developed a multinational presence through various consulting companies and offices. His selling tactics, bolstered by a Facebook following of over 1.7 million (he has a Spanish language page with one million followers as well), resort to a routine pattern, according to Frankel:

It starts with making unproven and sometimes far-fetched health claims, such as that spring mattresses amplify harmful radiation, and then selling products online — from vitamin supplements to organic yogurt — that he promotes as alternative treatments.

As Frankel reports, both Twitter and Facebook have taken down and issued cautions about several of Mercola's postings, He has been sued by the Federal Trade Commission for purveying disinformation regarding the cancer-reducing qualities of tanning beds, and he has received a warning from the FDA regarding his claims of about the efficacy of vitamin treatments in treating COVID-19 infection, and for selling unapproved health products. None of these actions appear to have dissuaded him from continuing to post misinformation. Frankel cites a recent example of Mercola continuing to raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccines through his social media feed.

As noted above, Mercola is hardly the only one responsible for vaccine denialism; he is simply has the biggest audience. It's clear though, from what is happening on the ground in Florida, for example, with the widespread refusal among a susceptible, medically ignorant population to accept these vaccines (even in the face of increased infections and deaths), that this country faces an almost perfect storm of disinformation.

Fear is indeed the "mind-killer." By cynically downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic over the past year and a half, Republicans like Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and their allies in the US. Congress and state legislatures have fostered an environment where people's fears and doubts take precedence over science. Those fears and doubts are then exponentially amplified and reinforced by what they read on social media. The anti-vaccine movement has taken full advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to sow doubt and regurgitate false or misleading information.

What we are witnessing right now in this country is the predictable outcome of these two insidious, destructive, and wholly complementary narratives, almost in real time.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/facebook-pro-trump-groups/

salon no twt

Reporting on Friday revealed that Facebook knowingly allowed a digital marketing firm tied to a pro-Trump group to release a series of ads purporting to be from a fake left-wing organization ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, while election officials failed to investigate the group at the time.

As The Guardian reported, a right-wing marketing firm called Rally Forge ran a $5,000 ad campaign beginning just days before the2018 election, showing ads promoting Green Party candidates in an effort to split the Democratic vote and help Republicans in several close races. The ads were purported to be placed by a group called America Progress Now and expressed support for democratic socialism.

Facebook launched an investigation into the ads just after the election and quickly determined that America Progress Now's official page on the platform was run by the same three men—Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan—who were administrators for Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump college organization.

To the alarm of a number of Facebook employees, The Guardian reported, the company did not find Rally Forge or Turning Point USA to be in violation of any of its policies.

One product manager at the time said a case could be made for Rally Forge and Turning Point USA having engaged in voter suppression through the ads, and asked, "Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?"

After the election, Facebook deactivated several other right-wing accounts run by the administrators, but the move did not stop Rally Forge from establishing a "troll farm" out of Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. Working for Turning Point Action, a group linked to Turning Point USA, the firm hired teenagers to post pro-Trump messages on social media, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the election system.

Sophie Zhang, aformer Facebook employee who participated in the investigation of the fake Green Party ads, wrote on Twitter Friday, "One wonders if [Rally Forge] would have escalated to troll farms, had FB deterred them in 2018." twt]

"This is egregious," tweeted the women's rights group UltraViolet on Friday.

Beyond Facebook's decision to allow the firm to remain on Facebook after determining the ads were fraudulent, the ads "appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and include proper disclosures on advertisements," The Guardian reported.

"This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw 'America Progress Now' ads promoting Green party candidates would've had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, told The Guardian.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC in 2019 over America Progress Now and the administrators' failure to disclose the true source of the Facebook ads, only to have the case dismissed before the FEC could conduct an investigation.

The election commissioners declined to look further into the complaint after a man named Evan Muhlstein contacted them to take full responsibility to the ads, claiming he alone had failed to file the ad expenditures with the FEC and saying his "inexperience" was to blame.

"The FEC's job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters' right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation," Fischer said.

According to former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017, Muhlstein's admission to the FEC appeared to amount to "clear fraud," as he never disclosed to the officials that the ads had been the work of Rally Forge.

At the time, though, Muhlstein's claim was enough to convince at least one FEC commissioner, James "Trey" Trainor, that the CLC had engaged in "wild speculation" by filing a complaint.

"This case wasn't about a 'fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,'" Trainor wrote. "In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech."

Zhang denounced the FEC for failing to contact Facebook regarding Muhlstein's claim to verify that he'd administered the America Progress Now page—a cursory investigation which would have immediately revealed the true owners of the page.

"It's quite possible that FB would have blown the FEC off," Zhang said. "But many employees were upset over this case, and may have come forward if asked. I would likely have if I'd known."

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soc med bias BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/**trump-used-facebook-:{amplify:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-fox-news**-and-its-personalities-course-network-wants-him back on

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===

2 yr suspension?

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/trumps-failed-blog-shows-how-much-he-needs-facebook-and-platform-could-give-his-account

===

no lnx twt

Welcome back to HEATED, a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis—written by me, Emily Atkin.

A new anti-climate leader

Dan Bongino, a climate denier who spread the Texas wind energy lie, is gearing up to take Rush Limbaugh's place today.

Emily Atkin May 24

Dan Bongino at Fox News Channel Studios on June 18, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.

Rush Limbaugh’s death in February left a deep hole where some of America’s most influential climate disinformation used to be. That hole will start being filled today, as far-right Fox News pundit Dan Bongino steps in to take Limbaugh’s place.

Twitter avatar for @TPPatriots

Tea Party Patriots

@TPPatriots]

Donald Trump to Be First Guest on Bongino's Show, Expect a Powerful Debut Episode in Limbaugh's Old Time Slot

Dan Bongino will begin a new chapter of conservative talk radio Monday with former President Donald Trump as his first guest.

patriotproject.com May 23rd 2021 204 Retweets1,127 Likes

Bongino, who in 2018 declared his life mission as “owning the libs,” is already an popular purveyor of general disinformation.His Facebookpage, The Bongino Report, regularly boosts false claims of election fraud, among other things.

Though the page only has about 135,000 followers, these posts “consistently land among the site’s top posts and outperform mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and Fox News,” reports Forbes. That’s in part because Facebook’s algorithim rewards misleading content from conservative creators, as Wired reported in March:

According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels of engagement per follower compared to any other category of news source. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t. 

Bongino is about to be rewarded even further with his new radio show. Though it’s yet unclear exactly how many of the 600 stations that once ran Limbaugh’s show will pick up Bongino’s, the opportunity to pick up some of Limbaugh’s 15 million regular listeners is large. In addition, earlier this month, Fox News also announced that it would start airing a new show on Saturday nights lead by Bongino, called “The Big Saturday Show.” 

Bongino is thus well-positioned to soon become one of the most influential sources of right-wing disinformation in America. Here’s what we can expect on climate front.

Less flagrant denial, more insulting liberals

Bongino is a straight-up climate denier, and for the most part, is not particularly shy about it. “These climate change alarmists have been wrong about just about everything. All their charts have been debunked,” he said on Fox in 2019. “The climate’s been relatively stable. There’s not any evidence that storms are out of control. All this stuff is made up.”

But just like the fossil fuel industry, Bongino’s anti-climate policy talking points lately have moved further away from flagrant denial. Instead, they promote more insidious falsehoods— like that wind energy was a significant contributor to deadly blackouts in Texas following February’s deep freeze, and that liberals were trying to cover it up.

Bongino delved into that subject specifically for a February episode of his podcast, which he began by strongly defending the quality of his own information regarding “What really happened with Texas and the energy system failures there.” “I never want to be first if I don’t have the facts,” he said. “I’m tired of the lies.”

Bongino went on to disparage “These filthy people on the left who can never ever tell the truth,” like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who he called a “sick little turd” for debunking Texas Republican officials’ prolific claims that wind energy was the culprit of Texas’s woes. Bongino did admit that natural gas and nuclear energy failed as well. But he said wind turbines had failed, too, and the only reason liberals were mad that Republicans were pointing it out was because they had to “protect their golden calf.”

He said liberals were taking “advantage of an ongoing tragedy to score cheap political points,” and added: “The hacks at Facebook and soviet fact-checkers will ding this segment because the facts trouble them.”

In reality, the blackouts in Texas were caused not by any particular power source, but by Texas’s failure to prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather. In order to protect their “golden calf”—fossil fuels—Republican officials publicly sought to place the majority of the blame for Texas’s blackouts on wind reliability. Practically every major news outlet in the country debunked that lie, an attempt to use a tragedy to score political points.

Still, Bongino adopted wholesale the argument made by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which was that the only reason nuclear and gas failed during the deep freeze was because it was trying to make up for the gaps in wind power. Ironically, that editorial was debunked by the journal’s own news section.

[Twitter avatar for @EricKleefeld Eric Kleefeld @EricKleefeld

Texas’ utter failure to winterize — despite a freeze and rolling blackouts 10 years ago — makes the choice of particular energy sources irrelevant. Their whole system is going down across the board!

This happens when you only pursue short-term cost cuts, don’t invest in safety.

February 18th 2021 44 Retweets213 Likes]

Green New Deal-bashing, arguments for human dominion

Here are some other trademark Bongino climate claims that we can expect to proliferate on conservative talk radio and Fox News as his profile continues to rise:

People who compare the challenge of climate change to World War II are participating in the “Moron Olympics.”

The Green New Deal is “outrageous,” “ridiculous,” and “expensive.” It looks “like it was conceived by a high schooler” and “proofread by a bartender.” It’s also not actually about climate change at all. It’s a “bad joke.”

“The climate changes all the time. Temperatures have been flat for 18 years.”

“We should care about the environment. It’s the right thing to do, if you’re really a God-loving person. But God gave us the world, not the other way around.”

“The Left is the one destroying their own credibility. Because ironically there are a lot of Republicans, me included, who are absolutely open to a conversation about a cleaner, better future, just not with a bunch of lunatics telling me the world is going to blow up.”

Moving forward, it’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are willing to sponsor claims like these. Bongino’s interview with Trump airs at noon EST. So, you know. Right now.

Bonus: Gina McCarthy on HBO]

===

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ammon-bundy/

david n kos

One of the consequences of the GOP's sidelong embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans. In some cases, they're demanding the overthrow of the party's establishment—which can't seem to decide whether to fight back or just succumb willingly to the incoming far-right tide.

Establishment Republicans in Western states are particularly under siege from extremist elements among their voting base. I**n Idaho**, for instance, armed-standoff-guru-turned-pandemic-denialist Ammon Bundy filed paperwork to run for governor, in a race already featuring another leading state "Patriot" movement figure. InNevada, an insurgent far-right group organized on social media and led by Proud Boys members are attempting an open hostile takeover of the Clark County GOP, the state's largest county-level Republican organization.

Bundy's filing is rich in irony. For starters, he is currently banned from the Idaho Statehouse in Boise after his two ejections and arrests for defying masking requirements, for which he is currently standing trial. For another, as KTVB notes, Bundy himself is not even registered to vote in Idaho, and has apparently never done so in the five years or so that he has lived in Emmett.

He also named himself the treasurer of his campaign, which means that he will have to refile the paperwork, according to the Idaho Secretary of State's office, which tweeted out an explanation: "Because a treasurer must be a registered Idaho voter, Ammon Bundy will either need to register and refile or name a new treasurer by refiling. IDSOS staff have notified him as such."

The Republican field to replace incumbent Governor Brad Little (who has not announced whether he will seek re-election) is already large, and Bundy's competition in the primary already features another leading "Patriot" movement figure, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin,who announced her candidacy last week. While Bundy was probably the earliest far-right figure in Idaho to take up the cause of opposing COVID-19-related public-health restrictions, McGeachin—who has supported Bundy and his fellow standoff-loving "Patriots" steadfastly from her office in Boise—has also been on the pandemic-denialist bandwagon.

McGeachin appeared alongside Bundy at one anti-restriction rally in Boise. More notoriously, she appeared in a video in which she brandished a handgun and a Bible while sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup, railing against coronavirus restrictions.

The political insurgency inside Clark County's NV] GOP was reported Friday by Rory Appleton at the *Las Vegas Review-Journal*,who explained that a group of far-right activists with deep ties to the Proud Boys are positioning themselves to take over the county Republican leadership. Some of its members, meanwhile, are alleged to have threatened a number of prominent Republicans.

The group, Appleton reported, organized online—primarily using the encrypted chat app Telegram—while reveling in anti-Semitic and white-nationalist memes and rhetoric. "Two Republican women in public office told the Review-Journal they've been threatened by leaders of the fringe movement, as did the current board of the Clark County party, which is hiring security for a crucial meeting Tuesday," the story reads.

Calling itself the "Republican Chamber of Commerce" (despite lacking ties to any known GOP organization), the far-right group first made its presence felt last month when it organized a late surge in votes favoring the censure of Barbara Cegavske, the state's Republican Secretary of State, for refusing to play along with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results based on Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud.

Since then, it has been preparing to provide a similar wave of votes to sweep three of their three leading figures—Rudy Clai, Matt Anthony and Paul Laramie—into the leadership of the Clark County GOP. The group has no record of doing business anywhere in the state of Nevada, and has no connection to any of the known chamber or Republican groups already established in Nevada.

Yet its website appears to be a nominally mainstream GOP group. Its primary emblem resembles the Republican National Committee's logo but inverted, with a red elephant on a white background encircled in red with the letters "RCC" and "Republican Chamber of Commerce" within.

Anthony has achieved a level of media notoriety as one of Las Vegas' most prominent Proud Boys, though he insists the local chapter is nonviolent and nonracist. After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he defended the people arrested and warned against a law-enforcement crackdown on "Patriots": "They're basically going all in on tyranny, guys. … They're watching. It's to be expected. They're the enemy. They're going to shut down our ability to communicate."

As it happens, Anthony is also a fugitive: He is the subject of an arrest warrant from the state of Michigan after he broke probation by moving to Nevada and then refusing to return after Nevada declined to oversee his probation, all stemming from his 2012 arrest on a drug charge.

The group's Telegram channel—owned by Anthony, and administered by Clai—is titled "Keep Nevada Open," apparently an offshoot of a Facebook group with the same name that boasted 17,000 members and organized anti-masking and other pandemic-related protests. Appleton describes a review of the channel's contents by the Clark County GOP executive board, led by chief of staff Richard MacLean:

MacLean showed his fellow board members several pictures and videos posted within the group, though not specifically by Anthony and Clai.

One photo blamed the 9/11 terrorist bombings on Jews. Another video featured a long clip of an Adolf Hitler speech and Nazi soldier marches. Some featured cartoon characters with negative Jewish stereotypes, and one photo featured messages written on dollar bills.

A post even poked fun at Republicans, claiming they seemed to be shocked at certain current events while white nationalists were thrilled by them.

The board promptly ejected the three men from the party. However, on Thursday, 10 people including Anthony and Clai filed a lawsuitagainst both the county and state party central committees, accusing them of illegally boxing them out of Clark County GOP meetings. They claim Clai and Anthony are heading up an alternative leadership slate, and are running against a mainstream ticket headed up by state Sen. Carrie Buck.

Despite the pushback by local Republican officials, the extremist elements remain emboldened in no small part because national-level Republicans have shown their eagerness to ignore the radicalism and even embrace it. Certainly, the local far-right leaders are confident that the party's base supports them, and not the establishment players.

"We have the numbers, and they don't, so they have to play dirty," Anthony said in an interview Thursday. "It's that simple."

McGeachin's campaign signs feature the hashtag #IAmIdaho. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are at a pivotal moment in history, not just for Idaho but for our nation," McGeachin said.

Bundy told NBC News on Monday that, despite the filings, he hasn't formally announced his candidacy, but is preparing to build a campaign organization.

"The people of Idaho are very freedom-minded," Bundy said. "I had never desired (to run for office), but I knew as early as 2017 that I would run for governor of Idaho."

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===

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/6/donald_trump_facebook_ban

s

hoshana Zuboff: Facebook’s Oversight Board Is Not Enough. The Government Has to Regulate Big Tech

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anti-trust?

===

boosted orig daily mail UK biden burger BS?

---

521 mma

facebook masks

Facebook is allowing users to promote and organize maskless marches and mask-burning events

04/09/21 10:54 AM EDT

Daystar broadcasts vaccine misinformation on Facebook

Right-wing ministry continues to use Facebook to dispense deadly COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation to millions of followers

03/29/21 11:03 AM EDT

coronavirus social media

A falsified audio clip spreading COVID-19 misinformation is still circulating on Facebook and other platforms

03/19/21 10:51 AM EDT

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-says-it-didnt-realize-stop-steal-was-coordinated-effort-delegitimize-election

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/secret-facebook-groups-reveal-how-prevalent-racist-beliefs-election-lies-and-qanon-theories-are-among-military-members/

a disturbing number of Facebook users who belong to America's military and other special forces have deep-rooted beliefs and views on racism and other conspiracy theories such as the QAnon movement and the falsehoods surrounding the presidential election.

NBC News has conducted an analysis of hundreds of social media posts shared in four secret Facebook groups for "current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors. The publication notes that most of the politically charged content was shared within two groups—SF Brotherhood - PAC and US Special Forces Team Room.

Collectively, there are more than 5,000 Facebook users within those two groups with some users belonging to both private groups. Across the board, the U.S. Special Operations Command consists of approximately 70,000 personnel. Additionally, the special operations forces also have thousands more retired members. The highlighted Facebook posts cover a vast canvas of conspiracy theories.

For example, in one of the posts, a special forces member raised concerns about one conspiracy theory as he claimed "several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a 'Concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the people's government.'"

On Jan.7, just one day after the Capitol insurrection, a member of the U.S. Special Forces Team Room posted a message that read, "Trump was sabotaged once again!" adding, "trying to get to the bottom of the obvious election fraud now looks like it doesn't have a chance."

According to the publication's analysis, there are many disturbing posts that are relatively similar. The analysis has raised concern about the mindset of many members of the United States' lethally trained forces. Jack Murphy, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret recently voiced his concerns about radicalization within the special operations forces community.

"The story of radicalization in special operations is a story that needs to be told," said Murphy. "It has shocked and horrified me to see what's happened to these guys in the last five or six years."

Garry Reid, director of defense intelligence at the U.S. Department of Defense, noted that the Pentagon is currently working to incorporate methods to "better identify, detect, categorize and take action against any such behaviors in this department."

Reid said, "This is very disturbing material for me and very disturbing content that in no way would mirror the behavior expected of persons employed by the Department of Defense, and certainly not serving in the U.S. military."

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mma 121

Tech companies and social media platforms are furiously trying to distance themselves from the January 6th storming of the Capitol -- after many of them spent years catering to extremists. Here's some of what has emerged this week:

• QAnon podcasts supportive of the January 6 putsch are flourishing on Apple and Google podcast platforms -- even though a Media Matters’ report in October noted their presence and QAnon's link to violence.
• YouTube is still allowing videos pushing false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, even though it promised to crack down. Several of the videos have been monetized, and YouTube didn't take any action on them until Media Matters reported it.
• As we reported last week, YouTube is not only allowing militia groups linked to violence to recruit videos, but is also monetizing and profiting from them.
• YouTube removed Steve Bannon's podcast after numerous calls for violence, but it is still live on Google Play.
• The unfounded conspiracy theory claiming that martial law will be declared in the United States was going viral on TikTok, even though it clearly violates the platform’s community guidelines on misinformation.
• Far-right militias are using TikTok to organize and recruit new members. The content was on the platform before January 6th and has continued to circulate.
• The putsch was organized and led by Republicans and Trump supporters. Nevertheless, false claims blaming anti-fascists ("antifa") for the attack went viral on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. In fact, the only thing that kept Trump from amplifying the lie was his ban from social media.
• Trump supporters have been fleeing to platforms like Gab and Telegram, which have long been hotbeds of extremism.
• Data shows that Parler users posted from inside the Capitol on January 6.

We need a separate list for Facebook:

• Before the deadly pro-Trump putsch, several Republican Party organizations used Facebook to post a flyer that called for “Operation Occupy the Capitol” and promoted the hashtag “1776Rebel.”
• Dozens of Republican Party groups used Facebook to help organize bus trips to Washington, D.C. for the event.
• Pro-Trump group Women for America First and its leaders Kylie Jane Kremer and Amy Kremer, who organized the “Save America March” along with Ali Alexander, are still on Facebook and Instagram even though they post almost exclusively to promote “Stop the Steal” events.
• Facebook finally and belatedly announced plans to remove any “content containing the phrase ‘stop the steal,’” adding that “it may take some time to scale up our enforcement of this new step.” A Media Matters analysis identified at least 70 active Facebook groups that were either named for or affiliated with “Stop the Steal” that the company could have taken action against long ago. 46 of these groups were private. CNN continues to find such groups as well.
• Buzzfeed News reported that Facebook displayed ads for guns and military-related paraphernalia in its News Feed for people who engaged with content related to the putsch. Facebook said over the weekend that it would pause such ads, but BuzzFeed continues to see them.

===

121

zuck bans trump at least 2 wks after insurrection

---

judd leg--- alert to rove gps? ad darken warnock, elong nose of ossof jewish; pulled then put back 3x cf gaslight nation

===

1220

r reich

in the past 24 hours, eight of the top ten most popular posts on Facebook were created by far-right extremists—including Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, and Franklin Graham.¹

Every single day, these far-right figures are spreading radical right-wing conspiracy theories to tens of millions of Americans and are poisoning our news feeds with dangerous misinformation that is eroding our democracy.

Which is why Inequality Media—the progressive nonprofit I founded that counters the right wing's lies with clear, factual, and engaging viral videos and other content—has never been more important.

Inequality Media is one of the only progressive groups with a large enough following to match the biggest right-wing propagandists. Just look at our numbers: Our videos and posts are shared seven times more than Sean Hannity's, our Facebook page receives 15 times more engagement per post than Ben Shapiro, and our videos have been viewed more than 440 million times....

===

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medium 1220

Facebook’s Oversight Board has selected its first six cases. Depending on your perspective, the board is either a laudable experiment in accountable self-governance on Facebook’s part, or a PR exercise meant to paper over the fact that Facebook has built a fundamentally ungovernable platform. (Can it be both?) As Rest of World’s Louise Matsakis noted, the initial slate of content moderation decisions appealed to the board “concern many of the same topics that have plagued Facebook for years: hate speech, nipples, Nazis.” Most of the cases came from outside the United States, which makes sense, given that most Facebook users do, too.

===

an 12/20 a dodge distraction from election fail, go for superficial PC stuff ezier to detect?

Facebook changing 'race-blind' hate speech policy

AFP

San Francisco (AFP) - Facebook on Thursday said it is revising its systems to prioritize blocking slurs against Black people, gays and other groups historically targeted by vitriol, no

...

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

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

1120

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election/

 (AFP) - All it took was a Facebook page and a hashtag: As election tallies trickled in Donald Trump supporters were busy going viral, accelerating the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats were "stealing" the election under the rallying cry #StopTheSteal.It lived just 48 hours but the page quickly racked up 350,000 members, people subscribing to the conspiracy theory the Republican president too has been touting to his 88 million Twitter followers.Trump's social media "influencers" -- his son Donald Trump Jr, or the spokesperson of the Republican party Elizabeth Harrington -- also play...

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===

medcom

1120

Facebook Tested a New A.I.-Powered Misinformation Detector Months Before the…

It’s unclear whether the platform adopted the new approach

Dave Gershgorn in OneZero Member

Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group

The pro-Trump group attracted 300,000 members in just two days

Sarah Emerson in OneZeroMember only content

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

parker m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

related

sinclair national reporters have repeatedly pushed right-wing lies about supposed social media platform bias

10/27/20 4:47 PM EDT

A new study finds that Facebook is not censoring conservatives despite their repeated attacks

10/28/20 10:17 AM EDT

Some pro-gun Facebook pages are fearmongering about mass violence from the left after the election

10/26/20 11:44 AM EDT

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mma1120

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/some-pro-gun-facebook-pages-are-fearmongering-about-mass-violence-left-after-election

With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, three major pro-gun Facebook pages are fearmongering about Civil War-type violence from the left after the elections -- despite widespread evidence and reporting from experts that any violence which arises is likely to come from right-wing militias and white nationalist groups.

The Facebook pages The Truth About Guns, Guns Save Lives, and 2nd Amendment all shared articles to fearmonger about a looming threat of post-election violence coming from the left and aimed at supporters of President Donald Trump. The pages collectively have almost 2.5 million followers.

Despite attempts by right-wing and pro-gun media to tie this fear of post-election violence to the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd, a study of 7,750 of those protests nationwide found that 93% were peaceful.

Another study by the same group, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, and the research group Militia Watch found that five states do face a threat of increased election-related violence, but that it’s from right-wing militia groups.

On October 6, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf released a report saying the threat of violent white supremacy is the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland,” and wrote that he’s “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” This echoes a statement FBI Director Christopher Wray made to Congress in February that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” are now the “primary source of ideologically motivated lethal incidents” in the U.S.

The Truth About Guns 

On October 22, the Facebook page of pro-gun blog The Truth About Guns shared its own article alleging that the majority of Americans are expecting post-election violence and suggesting steps people can take to protect themselves. Written by John Boch, the article cites a poll from The Independent and JL Partners which found that 73% of Biden supporters and 77% of Trump supporters are worried about election violence.

Boch wrote that he’s not surprised by these numbers given the nationwide “political violence” following the police killing of George Floyd, and he said part of the answer is to know “Antifa” is deploying “guerilla warfare tactics” and using smoke bombs to create a “fog of war.” Boch told his readers that “Antifa mobs can do pretty much anything they want to you and you can’t stop them,” and that if you get taken down in a fight, “They will kick you in the head with their steel toe boots until you’re unconscious or dead.” 

The Truth About Guns shared this article on Facebook with the comment “Almost three-quarters of Americans expect violence during or after the election. Are you ready?” Many the commenters on the post either agreed antifa is a problem or stated that they’re prepared for violence.  

Guns Save Lives

On October 23, the Facebook page Guns Save Lives shared an American Military News article about four “Trump-supporting households” in Milford and Brookline, New Hampshire, that supposedly received anonymous letters threatening to attack their homes if Trump loses reelection but refuses to concede. The reported text of the letter is the same as that of an unverified viral image.

In sharing the article, Guns Save Lives questioned whether all “Trump supporters need to worry about being attacked.” The post received 507 reactions and 308 comments, many of which threatened that Trump supporters own guns and are ready to respond to any violence.  

2nd Amendment 

On October 21, the Facebook page 2nd Amendment — which is the Facebook page for the Salem Media-owned, pro-gun blog Bearing Arms — shared its own article claiming that Americans are bracing “for inevitable post-election violence.” Relying on no specific evidence or reporting, but rather a poll of Americans’ concerns, author Tom Knighton wrote that there is “ample reason to believe” that the aftermath of the election “won’t be particularly” peaceful.

The Bearing Arms article is based on a poll conducted by ROKK Solutions, Engagious, and the Sports and Leisure Research Group which found that 61% of respondents said they were concerned about a second Civil War. Knighton took the poll results to mean that if Trump wins, there will be riots in protest and if former Vice President Joe Biden wins, his supporters “will be so smug and self-righteous that they’ll take things too far and then you end up with a riot.”

Bearing Arms shared the article on its Facebook page with the comment “We’re less than two weeks out.” It received over 1,200 reactions and 682 comments, many of which agreed that the left will burn down cities and noted that Trump supporters are “locked and loaded.”

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aha qanon is apoc in minature, trump = messiah , wicked will be vanquished

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/the-extremist-qanon-movement-is-growing-and-being-weaponized-to-boost-trumps-reelection-campaign-report/

Whenever President Donald Trump is asked about QAnon, he will say a few nice things about the far-right conspiracy theorists while insisting that he doesn't know much about them. It isn't hard to understand why Trump is taking that approach: he wants the votes of QAnon supporters, while keeping some distance from them. In an article published in Axios on October 21, journalists Stef W. Kight and Sara Fischer report that the movement is still "growing" — and thatQAnon is being "weaponized to boost President Trump ahead of the election."

Kight and Fischer explain, "What began as a single conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to child trafficking four years ago is now part of a convoluted web of falsehoods being spread to undermine Joe Biden…. In a year of unrest and expected election turmoil, experts are concerned that belief in QAnon could be another instigator of violence in some communities if Trump loses in November."

According to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the federal government of the United States has been infiltrated by an international cabal of child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals — and Trump was put in the White House to fight against them. An anonymous figure named Q, members of the cult believe, is providing updates on the president's battle. QAnon members believe that everyone from billionaire Democrat George Soros to R&B superstar Beyoncé is part of the conspiracy, insisting that Beyoncé isn't really African-American but rather, is really an Italian woman and Soros ally named Ann Marie Lastrassi.

But as absurd as QAnon's beliefs are, FBI agents have warned that the movement is dangerous. Kight and Fischer note that security experts are worried about how QAnon will respond if Biden wins the election — and Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, who specializes in cyber-security for GroupSense, says that QAnon's possible response to a Biden victory on November 3 "keeps me up at night."

"Recent reports about what was purported to be Hunter Biden's computer hard drive have sparked renewed activity from Q, with more concrete ideas to latch onto," Kight and Fischer explain. "On the day the New York Post reported on the alleged hard drive, Q posted 16 times, per GroupSense."

President Trump's son Donald Trump, Jr., the Axios reporters point out, has been encouraging QAnon.

"Earlier this year, Donald Trump, Jr.jokingly insinuated that Biden was a pedophile — a nod to QAnon lore that many Democrats use their political power to hide widespread pedophilia," Kight and Fischer note. "Some Republican politicians' adoption of aspects of the theory has helped bring it more mainstream, Webster-Jacobsen said."

Some tech companies have been taking a stand against QAnon.

Kight and Fischer report, "On Monday, Spotify removed QAnon podcasts, and TikTok officially banned all QAnon content. YouTube and Peloton announced QAnon crackdowns last week. Facebook and Triller both banned QAnon earlier this month. Etsy banned QAnon products two weeks ago, and Twitter shut down QAnon accounts in July."

However, the Axios reporters add that "despite these bans, QAnon followers still find other places online to congregate, like Parler, a far-right social media app."

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mma 1020

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/right-leaning-pages-dominated-conversation-facebook-during-supreme-court-confirmation

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/hunter-biden-story/

comm dr

press freedom advocates and progressive journalists continued to sound the alarm Thursday following moves by both Twitter and Facebook to ban or restrict sharing of controversial New York Post reporting published earlier this week that claimed to uncover new details about the past work of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, based on emails and documents supposedly found by a computer repairman on an abandoned laptop and then given to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney.

As the Guardian reports:guk

In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful." Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the "link may be unsafe."

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, was among those critics Wednesday who said that while the reporting may itself have little or no merit, the decision by Twitter to block users' ability to share the Post's article—and to shut down the right-wing newspaper's main Twitter account—was a counterproductive and troubling move with long-term implications that should not be overlooked.

"This whole thing is an absolute gift to the right wing. It was a garbage story that wasn't going anyway, just showed Hunter doing the corruption we know about," Grim argued in a tweet. "Now the right will use this censorship to further delegitimize the election."

Right on cue late Thurdsay morning, Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texaswere among those charging that Twitter and Facebook, by their actions against the Post's story, were guilty of rigging the election in favor of the Democrats.

Grim's colleague at The Intercept, co-founder Glenn Greenwald, also let loose with his criticisms in a series of tweets Wednesday and again Thursday morning. For his part, in addition to other implications, Greenwald warned that all kinds of crucial reporting based on "unauthorized materials" would be in future jeopardy if such a policy by powerful media platforms was to remain unchallenged.

As one user said in response to Grim's tweet, the policy is not likely to maintain its aim only at reported pieces by right-wing outfits like the NY Post. "Today it was New York Post," the user said, "tomorrow it'll be Jacobin."

Greenwald also condemned self-identified liberals who were applauding Twitter's moves seemingly based on the sole fact that the actions were taken against a right-wing paper that published a story potentially damaging to Democrats. Such applause, he warned, misses the bigger implications of powerful tech corporations in the era of social media having such outsized impact on the public's ability to access information.

"Amazing how liberals are now full-on free market libertarians—let large corporations do whatever they want!—and have no understanding of or interest in monopoly power," Greenwald said.

While Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday came forth to say that the company's handling of the story was "unacceptable," the fault he articulated was not the blocking of content itself but that the "communications around our actions... was not great."

Weighing in on the debate Thursday morning, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who serves the district representing Silicon Valley, said he believed critics like Grim and Greenwald are making valid points but added that he still has questions about where the line should be drawn by platforms like Twitter or Facebook on so-called illegally obtained materials.

In direct response to Khanna's posted concerns and questions, Greenwald wrote: "That one can imagine a case where Facebook or Twitter validly block content—publication of the address or nude photos of a private citizen taken without consent—doesn't justify the broad rule Twitter invoked or repression of this story about the Bidens."

Meanwhile, Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, argued that the problem with Twitter's actions has nothing to do with how the company has communicated its reasoning. Similar to Greenwald, Timm warned such a policy—taken to its logical conclusion—would have woeful impacts on free speech and investigative journalism efforts like the Panama Papers project in 2016 which used internal documents—leaked or hacked or otherwise obtained—that exposed a global network of offshore banking operations and money laundering.

"No one really knows for sure, but there was a lot of speculation that the Panama Papers were hacked and then given to journalists," tweeted Timm. "Should Twitter wipe out all those old links too?"

Timm lamented that Twitter's decision will only serve to increase interest in the story—a dynamic that could be considered a backfire, especially if the nature or content of the reporting is, in fact, dubious.

"Now everyone will be talking about the NY Post story for a week instead of a day," Timmtweeted Wednesday night.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservatives-2020-421146

9/20

https://gizmodo.com/right-wing-content-flourishes-on-facebook-because-fearm-1845192571

even though right-wing elites repeatedly tout claims of anti-conservative bias on Facebook and other online platforms, in reality, the bulk of data shows the opposite to be true. Per a weekend Politico report, as we near the 2020 presidential election, some of the most engaging posts on Facebook come from conservative voices outside the mainstream media, including Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and David Harris, according to the Facebook-owned traffic analysis tool Crowdtangle. Engagement on Facebook is defined as likes, comments, shares, and reactions.

The company has maintained time and time again that its platform is free of political bias. Facebook says that its algorithm doesn’t favor conservatives, but it also doesn’t have to because the right has one primal advantage:

“Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” a Facebook executive told Politico. They added that conservative content caters to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by referencing concepts like “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.” Essentially, the right-wing finds so much success online because it leverages the same fearmongering tactics on which early 20th-century dictators rose to power.

“That was there in the [19]30's. That’s not invented by social media—you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media. It’s why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it’s also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. ...This wasn’t invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.”

(Politico’s report doesn’t name the Facebook executive they spoke with. We’ve reached out to Facebook for additional information regarding these claims and will update this article with their response.)

Democrats have long been playing catch-up to try and secure the same online foothold that conservative media maintains, and in the past have accused Facebook of kowtowing to the right to avoid perpetuating the idea that they have a liberal bias. Those allegations have surfaced once more as both parties pour nearly $150 million into political ads on the platform and desperately compete for user engagement in these last weeks before the election, according to Facebook’s political ad tracker.

Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden has repeatedly denounced Facebook’s speech policies, arguing that, in its attempts to appear neutral, the tech giant has given politicians free rein to push inaccurate claims and allowed dangerous misinformation campaigns to take root and flourish on its platform.

The watchdog group Media Matters, which is known for monitoring conservative media, tracks 5,250 Facebook pages and groups determined to be either influential or of concern,an agency spokesperson told the outlet.

“There’s something [at Facebook] that reflexively or intentionally is mollifying the right-wing,” Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, said in an interview with Politico.

A former Facebook employee, Adam Conner, echoed this sentiment. Connor, who now works as VP of Tech Policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, told the outlet that the platform is far from neutral, and that, “Facebook is not a mirror—the newsfeed algorithm is an accelerant.”

However, the Facebook executive Politico spoke to disagreed, arguing that the left’s losing battle against right-wing populism existed long before social media amplified their embarrassing struggle.

“If you’re a far-left partisan then why can’t you fight fire with fire? That debate among progressives—[and] I count myself as a center-left progressive—is as old as the hills. All center-left campaigners and politicians always ask themselves, ‘Why can’t [we] seem to rile their supporters as much as right-wing populists have?’”

Having said all that, it should be noted that Facebook has been caught relaxing its fact-checking standards for right-wing content in the past. Internal discussions reviewed by NBC News revealed that the company waived “strikes” and downgraded violations for spreading misinformation for conservative news outlets and personalities like Breitbart and Trump surrogates Diamond and Silk. A Buzzfeed investigation also alleged that a Facebook employee was fired after amassing evidence of the company’s preferential treatment for right-wing pages.

The deck certainly appears stacked in the right’s favor. Conservatives are purportedly facing less culpability online, with Facebook giving them essentially a free pass to spew any bullshit they please in the digital sphere. Typically it’s whatever’s likely to rile up their base the most. And with that content, they’re specifically tapping directly into their supporters’ lizard-brain fears to override any sense of logic or factual evidence they may otherwise come across. It’s like a perfect storm of ignorance.

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How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

Washington Post. 20 February 2020.

Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

Bloomberg Businessweek. 17 September 2020.

no lnx

Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

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

By  and September 17, 2020,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FBriskass

https://onezero.medium.com/the-risk-makers-720093d41f01

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo

“I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions. I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count.” “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew leaders of countries around the world were using their site to manipulate voters — and failed to act.

Picture of Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Picture of Ryan Mac

Ryan Mac

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Picture of Pranav Dixit

Pranav Dixit

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on September 14, 2020, at 3:36 p.m. ET

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

Kenzo Tribouillard / Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Brussels, Feb. 17, 2020.

“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” Zhang wrote.

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.

In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.

Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”

In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch." Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.

In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.

Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.

After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.

In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence" the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

“We’ve built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. "It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company."

BuzzFeed News is not publishing Zhang’s full memo because it contains personal information. This story includes full excerpts when possible to provide appropriate context....much more [nervous brkdown quit?]

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MORE ON THIS

• Facebook Said It Removed A Militia Event Page Threatening Violence In Kenosha. It Didn’t.Ryan Mac · Sept. 3, 2020
• “Facebook Is Hurting People At Scale”: Mark Zuckerberg’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve BuiltRyan Mac · July 23, 2020
• Facebook Says Trump’s Misleading Post About Mail-In Voting Is OK. Employees Say It’s Not.Craig Silverman · Sept. 4, 2020

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-said-it-was-removing-ads-voting-misinformation-we-found-least-80-still-active

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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/23/facebook-sued-over-kenosha-killings/

WHEN 17-YEAR-OLD Kyle Rittenhouse killed two Black Lives Matter protesters (and wounded a third) in late August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he instantly became a hero among white nationalist circles, in which theSecond Amendment is sacrosanct.

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On Wednesday, Rittenhouse and the members of the armed militias that supported him, including the Kenosha Guard and Boogaloo Bois, were named in a federal lawsuit brought under the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments that aimed to establish Black equality.

The suit also names what it alleges was the militia groups’s most prominent enabler: Facebook. All of the parties, the complaint contends, helped deprive Kenosha Black Lives Matter protesters of their First Amendment right to assemble, thus violating the Black Lives Matter activists’ 14th Amendment right to equal protection.

attorneys Jason Flores-Williams and Jennifer Sirrine filed the case in the Eastern District Court of Wisconsin, which covers Kenosha. Along with a handful of protesters harassed by the militia groups, the plaintiffs include Hannah Giddings, the life partner of 26-year-old Anthony Huber, who was gunned down by Rittenhouse while trying to disarm the teenager.

According to the complaint, the Kenosha Guard, Boogaloo Bois, and Facebook all partook in a conspiracy that resulted in Huber’s death (thus causing harm to Giddings) and deprived the other plaintiffs of their ability to peacefully protest.

Both the First and 13th amendment stipulations were key to Griffin v. Breckenridge, a U.S. Supreme Court case that was decided in 1971 and is cited in the complaint. That case concerned the right to travel, which is also an issue in the Kenosha protests. Some of the plaintiffs had their tires slashed and were otherwise impeded.

The 14th Amendment provided the constitutional basis for federal statutes §1985 and §1986, which prohibit interference by private groups with other’s exercise of their rights. Established under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the statutes were recently applied in the aftermath of the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protest in 2017.

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In order to recruit foot soldiers for the August 25 protest, the Kenosha Guard created an event page on its Facebook account. Titled “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property,” the posting summoned “patriots willing to take up arms … and defend our City from the evil thugs.”

Over 450 Facebook users alerted the platform’s moderators that the Guard’s violent rhetoric violated the company’s policies. According to BuzzFeed News, four Facebook moderators deemed the Guard’s posts “non-threatening.”

In Flores-Williams’s view, Facebook’s actions subsequent to the event — shutting down the Guard’s account and admitting to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called an “operational mistake” in not heeding the 450 warnings — amounted to a recognition it behaved with negligence.

“Facebook’s negligence enabled the conspiracy here,” said Flores-Williams. He maintains that “this is not a First Amendment issue. It’s a matter of responsibility on the part of Facebook.”

“I would love to see Facebook change their moderation policies and for them to take accountability. One way to do that would be for them to make the moderators work directly for the company instead of outsourcing them,” added Sirrine.

Citing the likelihood of voter intimidation by armed militias on Election Day, and the possibility that those same groups may try to keep Donald Trump in the White House should he lose in November, Flores-Williams hopes that the action in federal court will send the company a message.

“If Facebook won’t change their M.O.,” he said, “then a judge needs to tell them to enforce their own standards and stop allowing violent groups to use their site as a recruiting station.”

A Facebook spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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mma 920

we've already documented the right-wing lies about absentee and mail-in voting at length, and how those lies have permeated Facebook.

A new Media Matters study shows that such lies are also all over YouTube. We assessed the top 100 YouTube videos about mail-in voting (as identified through a search on the tool BuzzSumo) with at least 10,000 views from right-leaning, left-leaning, and nonaligned YouTube channels over a six-month period between March 1 and August 31:

• Right-leaning channels posted 39 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 8.6 million views -- nearly half of the total views (47%).
• Left-leaning channels posted 22 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 4.2 million views (23% of the total) -- less than half as many views as right-leaning channels.
• Nonaligned channels posted 33 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 5.6 million views (30% of total views).
• The top 100 videos about voting by mail that accumulated at least 10,000 views came from 52 different channels.

Watch: The rank hypocrisy of the Judicial Crisis Network

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mma 920

August, Facebook promised to remove QAnon groups on its platform that “discuss potential violence”. However, many QAnon groups are still explicitly violating Facebook’s apparent policy and are as active as ever. Using CrowdTangle, an analytics tool owned by Facebook, Media Matters identified 19 large QAnon groups using violent rhetoric that seemingly violate Facebook’s new policy.

Facebook has said that QAnon groups have been able to “evade” enforcement mechanisms and the company is working with “external experts on ways to disrupt” this activity. While some groups have made changes to their names, such as “changing ‘Q’ to ‘Cue,’” the substance of these public posts remains easily identifiable and obviously violent.

Media Matters Olivia Little explained, “QAnon content continues to widely proliferate on the website, indicating Facebook was either unprepared to actually follow through with the promise to remove groups that discuss violence, or had no intention of actually doing so after receiving initial praise. Either way, Facebook’s public promise to remove QAnon groups promoting violence garnered positive PR even while the online community continued to expand.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/facebook-allowing-campaign-ditch-face-masks-en-masse-spread

no pix lnx

Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread

The posts are calling for people to burn and trash face masks on a specific day in September

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM KAYLA GOGARTY

PUBLISHED 09/10/20 10:18 AM EDT

A campaign urging people to burn and get rid of face masks en masse on September 15 has been spreading on Facebook and Instagram, despite multiple state laws and health experts’ guidance to wear them.

As the novel coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, both public officials and health experts have urged people to wear masks to decrease the spread of the coronavirus. Numerous states have also instituted mandates for people to wear masks when in public.

Nevertheless, since at least the beginning of September, posts have spread on Facebook and Instagram calling for a mass rejection of masks on September 15, getting at least tens of thousands of engagements combined. The posts have often used a handful of memes that encourage people to “throw that filthy thing away” or “burn your masks” on September 15 because “we the people have decided that the masks are no longer mandatory.” One such meme was shared by a congressional candidate who supports the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Instagram mask meme1

Facebook mask meme1

Facebook mask meme2

In particular, the campaign and these memes have spread throughout public Facebook groups that have tens of thousands of members combined.

Facebook mask meme groups1

Facebook mask meme groups2

Facebook mask meme groups3

There are also indications that the campaign has spread in private “reopen” Facebook groups and anti-mask groups as well.

Facebook mask meme private groups

Additionally, multiple Facebook events promoting the campaign have popped up and been shared on the platform.

Facebook mask campaign events

The campaign has also appeared on some other platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, with some content using the same Facebook memes and a YouTube video that pushes it even carrying revenue-generating ads.

Facebook has repeatedly served as a vector for coronavirus misinformation, particularly through the groups feature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Ali Akbar Election 2020

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funny, i think it was harvard fascist guy or something on alt rt milita portland kenosha suggested next phase is round up dem leaders // Qanon:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/gop-candidate-and-qanon-supporter-posts-threatening-picture-targeting-democratic-lawmakers/

no pix twt

one of the summer’s biggest political shockers came when QAnon extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia. Considering how overwhelmingly Republican her district is, she is likely to win the general election and be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January — and Greene, who has a history of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic remarks, now appears to be directing threatening congresswomen of color she is likely to be colleagues with next year.

On her Facebook page, Greene posted an image of herself holding a gun alongside images of three Democratic progressives —  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — and wrote: “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.”

Facebook removed Greene’s post, describing it as a terms of service violation. And Omar is speaking out about the post, accusing her of inciting violence.

Omar tweeted, “Posting a photo with an assault rifle next to the faces of three women of color is not advertising. It’s incitement. There are already death threats in response to this post. Facebook should remove this violent provocation.”

In a different Facebook post attacking those congresswomen, Greene wrote, “Hate America leftists want to take this country down. Politicians have failed this country. I’m tired of seeing weak, establishment Republicans play defense. Our country is on the line. America needs fighters who speak the truth.”

Given Greene’s willingness to promote the unhinged QAnon conspiracy cult, Omar is right to be concerned. QAnon believes that an international ring of pedophiles and Satanists has infiltrated the United States’ federal government and that President Donald Trump was chosen to combat the ring. The “Q” is a reference to an anonymous figure who supporters of the cult believe is giving them updates on Trump’s battle. And the FBI has linked QAnon to acts of violence.”

Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar, along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, comprise the four congresswomen of color who are known as The Squad in the House. All of them were elected during the huge blue wave in the 2018 midterms that gave Democrats control of the House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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