harbath, katie

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-denies-facebook-right-wing-echo-chamber-facts-tell-different-story</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since 2016, Facebook has taken an increasingly conservative bent, with much of the internal activism reportedly the result of&nbsp;<a href="https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Kaplan and Katie Harbath</a>, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections and former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee. In January, Facebook hired former Fox & Friends senior producer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/after-enabling-right-wing-propaganda-facebook-hires-fox-news-veteran-key-news-role" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Jennifer Williams</a>&nbsp;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,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">The Washington Post</a>&nbsp;published a bombshell report detailing some of their behind-the-scenes&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">conservative advocacy</a>&nbsp;at Facebook.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives">https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/</font></a></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,</a>” has blown the lid off<b>&nbsp;Facebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail how</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Ankhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">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.</span></b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” 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.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook also has recently invested&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Foreign-Investments-Reliance-Jio-Security-Concern" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio</a>&nbsp;for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/facebook-reliance-jio/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">largest investments</a>&nbsp;ever by any tech company for a minority stake.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">&nbsp;The&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/facebook-reliance-jio/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">largest</a>&nbsp;number of Facebook and&nbsp;<b>WhatsApp</b>&nbsp;users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million user</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">s.&nbsp;<a href="https://money.cnn.com/2014/02/19/technology/social/facebook-whatsapp/index.html#:_{:text=In%20a%20play%20to%20dominate,the%20five-year%20old%20company.}" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion</a>&nbsp;in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thebci.org/news/are-whatsapp-and-gdpr-on-a-collision-course.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">rules of engagement are completely opaque</a>. Even more than Facebook,&nbsp;<b>WhatsApp has been the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597mwk/modis-trolls-are-ready-to-wreak-havoc-on-indias-marathon-election" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">major social media platform for the BJP</a>&nbsp;and its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newsclick.in/bjp-troll-sena-exposed" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">troll army</a>&nbsp;to spread disinformation, as it was for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-news-brazil-election-favoured-jair-bolsonaro-analysis-suggests" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil</a>.</b></span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-staff-demand-policy-changes-on-india-hate-speech-11598008322" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a>&nbsp;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&nbsp;<b>tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures."</b></font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>this is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed</b>. In a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">2017 article for Bloomberg</a>, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote that&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Facebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">‘</a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">troll armies</a>’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;They also wrote that&nbsp;</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Katie Harbath,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.” In 2018, a&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Facebook-India-Hate-Speech-BJP-Politics" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">five-</a><a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Facebook-India-Hate-Speech-BJP-Politics" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">article series</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the<b> BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team,</b> and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The August 14 WSJ article&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">identified</a>&nbsp;<b>three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech</b>: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and to<b>&nbsp;shoot Rohingyas,&nbsp;</b>Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a>&nbsp;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.”)&nbsp;<b>Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi,</b>&nbsp;for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Mark Zuckerberg</a>.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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&nbsp;<a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719897599/facebook-bans-alex-jones-louis-farrakhan-and-other-dangerous-individuals" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">including the United S</a><a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719897599/facebook-bans-alex-jones-louis-farrakhan-and-other-dangerous-individuals" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">tates</a>.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>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.</b>&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of&nbsp;<a href="https://bestmediainfo.com/2020/02/warc-global-ad-trends-the-alphabet-and-facebook-duopoly-is-now-worth-more-to-advertisers-than-tv/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media</a>&nbsp;under capitalism, but also in terms of influence.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The greater the engagement that you can generate, the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Purnell and Horwitz&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;that “<b>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</b>.”</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a&nbsp;<b>social role and therefore needs to be&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The_Elephant_Next_Door-A_Survey_of_International_Media_Ownership_Regulations.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">regulated for public good</a>.&nbsp;</b>The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice,&nbsp;<a href="https://tinyurl.com/yy4bo78p" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">has a code that the press is expected to follow</a>. In the U.S.,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-media/u-s-court-deals-setback-to-fcc-push-to-revamp-media-ownership-rules-idUSKBN1W81YU" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">cross-holdings</a>&nbsp;between&nbsp;<a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/books_cross-ownership/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">different kinds of media</a>&nbsp;are regulated.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly&nbsp;<a href="https://theappeal.org/last-weeks-big-tech-antitrust-hearings-sent-an-unmistakable-message-change-is-in-the-air-for-americas-corporate-giants/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">were cited</a>&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-amazon-documents-captivated-hearing/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">congressional hearing in July</a>&nbsp;with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is&nbsp;<a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4365092-gafa-objectively-analyzing-impact-of-antitrust-scrutiny" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">nearly $5 trillion</a>. 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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">.&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">98.5</a><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">&nbsp;percent</a><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">&nbsp;of its income is from advertisements</a>. 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&nbsp;<a href="https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">fake news posts drive virality</a>, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.adl.org/blog/hateful-and-conspiratorial-groups-on-facebook" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">feeds off hate and fake news</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.&nbsp;<b>An internal study had found that&nbsp;</b></span><b><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">64</a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">&nbsp;percent</a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">&nbsp;of members who had joined extremist groups</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;did so thanks to Facebook’s&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">recommendation tools.</span></b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook.&nbsp;<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Google’s search engine</a>&nbsp;has shown similar problems, as has its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google-photos-tags-two-african-americans-as-gorillas-through-facial-recognition-software/#5cb1b146713d" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">image recognition algorithms</a>. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/8/20/21375381/facebook-qanon-purge-content-policy-tide-pods" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">leader in spreading hate politics</a>&nbsp;and fake news in the world.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">WhatsApp i</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">n their campaigns.&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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,&nbsp;<a href="https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-curse-of-bigness/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">breaking up their monopolies</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://justnetcoalition.org/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">regulating them as public utilities</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="" href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/imi-articles/?author=Prabir+Purkayastha" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Prabir Purkayastha</a><span style="outline-color: initial; outline-width: initial;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">&nbsp;is the founding editor of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newsclick.in/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Newsclick.in</a>, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.</span></span></span></font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">This article was produced in partnership by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newsclick.in/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Newsclick</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Globetrotter</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</font></span></span></p></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></b></div></div><div><p><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></b></p><p><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-hypocrite-and-trumpist" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="">https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-hypocrite-and-trumpist</font></a></span></p><header class="editorial-fullheader" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p class="subtitle" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook CEO knew what he was doing wading into the president’s latest tantrum</font></span></p><p class="byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0.3rem; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="bylinelabel" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0.5rem;">WRITTEN BY</span>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/author/parker-molloy" hreflang="en" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">PARKER MOLLOY</a></font></span></p><div class="dateline--group" style="box-sizing: border-box; align-items: center; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;"><p class="dateline" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="datelinelabel" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0.5rem;">PUBLISHED</span>&nbsp;<time datetime="2020-05-28T14:11:18-0400" style="box-sizing: border-box;">05/28/20 2:11 PM EDT</time></font></span></p></div></header><div class="editorial-fullarticle" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2.25rem;"><div class="field field--name-field-stories-content field--type-entity-reference-revisions field--label-hidden" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think social media companies should be arbiters of truth. He’s full of shit.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In&nbsp;<a href="https://video.foxnews.com/v/6159879311001#sp=show-clips" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">an interview</a>&nbsp;with Fox News anchor Dana Perino, the Facebook founder and CEO chided Twitter for its decision to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-adds-fact-check-warning-trump-tweets/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">add a fact check</a>&nbsp;to one of President Donald Trump’s tweets containing an unhinged conspiracy theory about rampant voter fraud.&nbsp;According to Zuckerberg, that’s not the kind of thing Facebook would do because the social media company is committed to free speech and letting people judge for themselves whether politicians are telling the truth. But as is so often the case when it comes to the Silicon Valley billionaires guiding our digital lives, he’s not being entirely honest about how Facebook has handled the Trump era.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Let’s review the simple truth about Zuckerberg: He’s a hypocrite and a Trumpist.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It might seem Facebook has followed this&nbsp;“free speech” approach in turning a&nbsp;blind eye to Trump’s many lies, but&nbsp; he's&nbsp;shown he’s more than willing to be an “arbiter of truth” for others.&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182222309230722" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 102); box-sizing: border-box; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Facebook does fact-check</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;posts, and it does limit their reach and flag violations based on what third-party fact-checkers determine -- but it has also</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;carved out a Trump-sized exemption for politicians. Prior to&nbsp;</span><a href="https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 102); box-sizing: border-box; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">an October change</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;to Facebook’s advertising rules on false information, Trump had been repeatedly violating its policies without facing consequences. That October policy change</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">exempted politicians on the advertising side of things, as well.</span></font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Statements from politicians are exempt from fact-checking on Facebook except for two specific areas: misleading posts about the U.S. Census and voting.“Attempts to interfere with or suppress voting undermine our core values as a company, and we work proactively to remove this type of harmful content,” reads an October Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/update-on-election-integrity-efforts/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">blog post</a>&nbsp;on content that may suppress votes. “We remove this type of content regardless of who it’s coming from.” This was later clarified on Facebook’s&nbsp;<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2019/12/helping-protect-the-us-census/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">blog</a>&nbsp;post about census misinformation, specifying that “as with voter interference, content that violates our census interference policy will not be allowed to remain on our platforms as newsworthy even if posted by a politician.”</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In March, Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-trump-campaign-to" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">briefly allowed</a>&nbsp;the Trump campaign to run ads that violated its census interference policy before changing course. According to a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-letting-trump-campaign-publish-least-529-ads-false-claims-voter-fraud" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Media Matters analysis</a>&nbsp;earlier this month, the Trump campaign published at least 529 Facebook ads with false claims of voter fraud in just two days, which it shouldn’t have received exemptions to do under Facebook’s voter suppression rule.</font></span></p><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook is extremely comfortable being the “arbiters of truth,” so long as “truth” matches what Trump and pro-Trump groups say&nbsp;</font></span></h2><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2019, after an anti-abortion group posted videos on Facebook claiming that “abortion is never medically necessary,” a&nbsp;<a href="https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/lila-rose-claim-that-abortion-is-never-medically-necessary-is-inaccurate-it-is-necessary-in-certain-cases-to-preserve-mothers-life-young-america-foundation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">fact check</a>&nbsp;from medical professionals marked that as false. But after&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-seemingly-caves-right-wing-pressure-anti-abortion-misinformation" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">right-wing media outlets</a>&nbsp;and several&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/2019-09-11_Hawley-Cruz-Cramer-Braun-Letter-Facebook-Live-Action.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Republican senators</a>&nbsp;complained that this accurate fact check was a form of censorship, Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/claudiakoerner/facebook-fact-check-abortion-video-doctors-medical" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">removed</a>&nbsp;it. Even after another&nbsp;<a href="https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/the-ifcn-concludes-investigation-about-science-feedback/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">third-party</a>&nbsp;entity reviewed the issue and cleared Facebook of “any systemic bias,” Facebook did not reapply its fact checks.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March, an offshoot of Fox host Tucker Carlson’s conservative outlet The Daily Caller used its fact-checking status on Facebook to get an unflattering post about the president marked as false and downranked.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;After Trump claimed that Democratic concern about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak and potential for it to take on pandemic status was a “hoax,”&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/trump-coronavirus-hoax-fact-check/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Check Your Fact</a>&nbsp;swooped in to get a Politico post about his comments marked as “false information.”</span></font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Earlier this month, The Lincoln Project, a group of “Never Trump” Republicans, released&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yG_-K2MDo" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">an ad</a>&nbsp;critical of Trump. After the president worked himself into a fury over the video on Twitter, Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-why-facebook-censored-an-anti-trump-ad/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">rejected</a>&nbsp;it as an ad and buried the organically uploaded version of the clip under a “partly false” label. It was so labeled because of its claim that&nbsp;“Donald Trump bailed out Wall Street but not Main Street” in the CARES Act.&nbsp;The thinking here apparently goes that because the bill did some good for “Main Street,” it was false enough for Facebook to reject it.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran an ad calling for the break-up of Facebook, Amazon, and Google, Facebook removed the post. After proving Warren’s point, Facebook reinstated the ads.</font></span></p></div></div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--twitter-tweet paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="field field--name-field-twitter-tweet field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For years, Zuckerberg and Facebook have been making increasingly obvious overtures&nbsp;to conservatives, even bringing on Republican operatives to help them craft policy.</font></span></h2><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2017, in an effort to address the flood of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">false news</a>&nbsp;being shared before the 2016 election, Facebook announced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/15/facebook-flag-fake-news-fact-check" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">fact-checking</a>&nbsp;partnerships with The Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes. Conservatives immediately complained, falsely claiming that these mainstream news organizations were somehow “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/12/15/facebook-introduce-warning-labels-stories-deemed-fake-news/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">left-wing</a>” and “<a href="http://www.mrc.org/press-releases/mrc%E2%80%99s-bozell-%E2%80%98assured%E2%80%99-facebook-fact-checking-won%E2%80%99t-target-stories-based-politics" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">liberal</a>” partisans, with&nbsp;<a href="https://dailycaller.com/2016/12/15/facebook-using-unreliable-liberal-fact-checker-to-fight-fake-news/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">The Daily Caller</a>&nbsp;claiming that Snopes was engaged in “outright lying in service of a liberal narrative.” Facebook responded to this criticism from the right by adding&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-partners-conservative-misinformer-weekly-standard-fact-checking?redirect_source=/blog/2017/12/06/facebook-partners-conservative-misinformer-weekly-standard-fact-checking/218761" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">The Weekly Standard</a>, an explicitly partisan conservative publication with a lengthy track record of spreading misinformation, as a fact-checker.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/5/2/18522758/facebook-fact-checking-partnership-daily-caller" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Check Your Fact</a>, an extension of The Daily Caller, was later added as another.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2018, after conservatives&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/04/12/complaints-about-facebook-selectively-silencing-conservatives-are-not-based-reality/219931" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">baselessly</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/04/12/fox-news-and-diamond-silk-push-debunked-lies-about-facebook-censorship/219934" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">complained</a>&nbsp;about supposed “anti-conservative bias” on Facebook, the site&nbsp;<a href="https://www.axios.com/scoop-facebook-committing-to-internal-pobias-audit-1525187977-160aaa3a-3d10-4b28-a4bb-b81947bd03e4.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">hired</a>&nbsp;former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl to audit the platform. Kyl’s eventual&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-gaslighting-all-us-its-audit-imaginary-anti-conservative-bias" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">report</a>&nbsp;was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/heres-data-facebooks-bias-report-doesnt-show-you" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">a flop</a>, but it showed just how easily Zuckerberg is goaded to adopt conservatives’ framing on any given issue.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In October,&nbsp;<a href="https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Popular Information</a>’s Judd Legum reported on Facebook’s embrace of the right. “Everyone in power is a Republican,” a former Facebook employee in the company’s D.C. office told Legum. “Decisions are made to benefit Republicans because they are paranoid about their reputation among conservative Republicans, particularly Trump.”</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To say “everyone in power is a Republican” didn’t actually turn out to be much of a stretch.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Facebook Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, the man who reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups like The Daily Caller and Breitbart, is a former deputy White House chief of staff for George W. Bush. Vice President for U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin is another former member of the George W. Bush administration, serving at the Federal Communications Commission. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Public Policy Director for Global Elections</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> Katie Harbath</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> is a longtime Republican operative and former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee.</span></font></span></p><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zuckerberg is not being duped by the right-wing; he’s part of it.</font></span></h2><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It’s telling that Zuckerberg’s first instinct&nbsp;was to side with Trump in his latest Twitter tirade and run to Fox News to defend the decision. It’s not surprising, but it’s telling all the same.&nbsp;</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Fox News is where Trump will be sure to see him, and Zuckerberg is pandering to his audience of one.</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In October, Zuckerberg met&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-hosted-zuckerberg-undisclosed-dinner-white-house-october-n1087986" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">secretly with Trump</a>&nbsp;for dinner at the White House. It’s anybody’s guess what the two of them discussed, but there’s only so much time one can devote to telling Trump that he’s “<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mark-zuckerberg-dinner-number-one-facebook-2020-1" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">No. 1 on Facebook</a>.”</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Last year,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/facebook-zuckerberg-conservatives-private-meetings-046663" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Politico</a>&nbsp;reported that Zuckerberg had connected quietly with conservative commentators, media executives, and politicians in a series of private meetings. Those of us on the outside should see this for what it is.&nbsp;As persistent as the Silicon Valley liberal stereotype is, this isn’t Zuckerberg meeting with his ideological opposites. This is Zuckerberg in his element, with his friends, getting ready to reelect the president. That’s who Mark Zuckerberg is, and it’s why he’s been giving Trump a pass this whole time.</font></span></p></div></div></div></div><p><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></p></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives">https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-report-shows-12-ways-facebook-favors-conservatives</a></font></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style=""><header class="editorial-fullheader" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><p class="subtitle" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.25em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook executive personally defended keeping up a network of fake news sites</font></span></p><p class="byline" style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3rem; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="bylinelabel" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0.5rem;">WRITTEN BY</span>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/author/john-whitehouse" hreflang="en" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">JOHN WHITEHOUSE</a></font></span></p><div class="dateline--group" style="box-sizing: border-box; align-items: center; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;"><p class="dateline" style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="datelinelabel" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0.5rem;">PUBLISHED</span>&nbsp;<time datetime="2020-02-20T15:39:19-0500" style="box-sizing: border-box;">02/20/20 3:39 PM EST</time></font></span></p></div></header><div class="editorial-fullarticle" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2.25rem;"><div class="field field--name-field-stories-content field--type-entity-reference-revisions field--label-hidden" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">new Washington Post report</a>&nbsp;goes deep on the ways that Facebook has given in to Republican demands out of fear of angering conservatives and Trumpists. Media Matters&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-gaslighting-all-us-its-audit-imaginary-anti-conservative-bias" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">has</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">repeatedly written</a>&nbsp;about this topic, and this appeasement is one reason that Mark Zuckerberg was named&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/misinformer-year-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">2017 Misinformer of the Year</a>.</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are some notable takeaways from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">Craig Timberg’s thorough reporting</a>:</font></span></p></div></div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;" /><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; clear: both; list-style: none; padding: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook executive Joel Kaplan, a former official in the George W. Bush White House, personally defended keeping up a network of fake news sites, saying, “We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” and that prominent right-wing figures did not believe that the content they pushed was fake news.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook may be making advertising decisions out of fear of angering Republicans.&nbsp;The company has continued to allow narrow targeting of political advertising to individuals by “their home address, gender, education level, income, marital status, job or other characteristics” even as Democrats warned that such targeting undermined transparency and eased the spread of disinformation. Google has limited targeting, and Twitter has banned political ads. The report quotes former Facebook executive Alex Stamos: “I think Facebook is looking at their political advertising policies in explicitly partisan terms, and they’re afraid of angering Republicans.”</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A former Facebook employee said Facebook does not know any other way to engage with Republicans other than to just give in. “Facebook does not speak Republican. … This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook’s desire to appease Republicans is a throughline of major decisions, including its decision to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-including-breitbart-its-facebook-news-feature-despite-supposed-prohibition-hate" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">allow Breitbart</a>&nbsp;in its news tab program.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Facebook met with Corey Lewandowski, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, shortly after the 2016 election to explore whether he could consult with the company on how to engage with Trump’s White House. Nothing ever came of it, though Timberg notes that “the encounter left many within the company uneasy about what Trump and his allies might do.</span>”</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Republicans gained clout inside Facebook during the Trump years, largely led by Joel Kaplan, but also by former</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Giuliani campaign aide Katie Harbath.</span></font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Kaplan and Harbath</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> set up the meeting with top Facebook executives and conservative media figures including Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck following the publication of a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/no-matter-what-mark-zuckerberg-does-conservatives-will-never-stop-claiming-theyre-victims" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">misleading</a>&nbsp;Gizmodo article about trending topics in 2016.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Facebook knew about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and its 2017 white paper on the topic avoided mentioning Russia allegedly in part to avoid angering the Trump administration.&nbsp;</span>From the Post piece:</font></span></p></li></ul></div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;"><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If we say Russia, it will center us in this discussion and anger the administration,” a person familiar with the political dynamics in Facebook’s Washington office recalled hearing.</font></span></p></div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; clear: both; list-style: none; padding: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While an internal audit (<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-caves-debunked-claims-right-wing-censorship" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">prompted by Republican claims of censorship</a>) turned up no evidence that Facebook was biased against conservatives, Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-gaslighting-all-us-its-audit-imaginary-anti-conservative-bias" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">still made moves</a>&nbsp;to appease right-wing figures.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes a harsh stance toward calls from progressives like Elizabeth Warren to regulate Facebook, he has been more conciliatory toward Trump even as the Justice Department began an antitrust review of tech companies, including Facebook.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Zuckerberg invited conservatives, including Grover Norquist, into his home to meet with them.</font></span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding-left: 2.4rem; position: relative;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decision by Facebook to allow lies in political advertisements was arguably made to appeal to Republicans:</font></span></p></li></ul></div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;"><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Right now Trump is president, and the company is obviously very attuned to the political winds,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a Washington-based umbrella group. “They all know [at Facebook] that the Justice Department and state attorneys general are sniffing around at regulations and litigation.”</font></span></p></div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anyway,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/no-matter-what-mark-zuckerberg-does-conservatives-will-never-stop-claiming-theyre-victims" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">we told you so</a>.</font></span></p></div></div></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/</font></a></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By&nbsp;</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Craig Timberg&nbsp;</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Feb. 20, 2020 at 10:20 a.m. PST</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When another Facebook staff member pushed for the entire list to be taken down on the grounds that the accounts fueled the “fake news” that had roiled the election, Kaplan warned of the backlash from conservatives.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“They don’t believe it to be fake news,” he said, arguing for time to develop guidelines that could be defended to the company’s critics, including on the right.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The debate over “Project P,” which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump and other party leaders have pressured Facebook by making unproven claims of bias against conservatives amid rising signs of government action on the issue, including investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Republicans also have leveraged Facebook’s fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions from a company whose most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">These sensitivities — in conjunction with the company’s long-standing resistance to acting as “an arbiter of truth” — have affected Facebook’s responses to a range of major issues, from how to address fake news and Russian manipulation of American voters on the platform to, more recently, the advertising policies that have set the political ground rules for the 2020 election, say people privy to internal debates.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Such factors have helped shape a platform that gives politicians license to lie and that remains awash in misinformation, vulnerable to a repeat of many of the problems that marred the 2016 presidential election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook, unlike Google and Twitter, also has refused calls to restrict politicians’ access to powerful ad-targeting tools — which Trump used with particular relish four years ago — that allow messages to be tailored to individual voters, based on characteristics Facebook has gleaned over years of tracking user behavior.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I think Facebook is looking at their political advertising policies in explicitly partisan terms, and they’re afraid of angering Republicans,” said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group, and a former Facebook chief security officer. “The Republicans in the D.C. office see themselves as a bulwark against the liberals in California.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The company says its decisions are guided not by political calculations but by global policy goals of expanding connections among users and protecting them from government overreach, in line with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to allowing speech on the social media platform to remain as unrestricted as possible.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“After 2016, we made massive investments in new teams and technology to make our products safer and to secure elections,” said company spokesman Andy Stone. “People on both sides of the aisle continue to criticize us, but we remain committed to seeking outside perspectives and building a platform for all ideas.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kaplan declined to comment for this article.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But critics — both outside Facebook and within its ranks — see something more akin to corporate realpolitik, a willingness to accede to political demands in an era when Republicans control most levers of power in Washington.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Facebook does not speak Republican,” said a former employee of Facebook’s Integrity Team, which was created to ensure safety and trust on the platform, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about a former employer. “This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the 16 years since its birth as a website to connect students at Harvard, Facebook has emerged as perhaps the world’s most far-reaching source of news and information, especially since it added the potent subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, creating a stable of globe-spanning communication tools with billions of users. Facebook’s technology played a role in fomenting democratic revolutions across the Arab world and helping to rally domestic political movements such as Black Lives Matter. But the platform also was used to help fuel a genocide in Myanmar, a U.N. report concluded, and has been used to live-stream violence, including video of a massacre at a New Zealand mosque.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The New Zealand shooting shows how YouTube and Facebook spread hate and violent images — yet again</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook’s power is coveted by American politicians, who know that the vast majority of U.S. voters have accounts. Trump already has spent more than $32 million on the platform for his reelection effort, while Democratic candidates, collectively, have spent more than $107 million, according to Facebook’s Ad Library, one of its transparency initiatives. Andrew Bosworth, a top corporate executive considered a confidant of Zuckerberg, said in a post in December that Facebook was “responsible for Donald Trump getting elected” in 2016 through his effective advertising campaign — a comment that underscored the stakes of the company’s policy moves.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook’s quest to quell conservative criticism has infused a range of decisions in recent years, say people familiar with the company’s internal debates. These included whether to allow graphic images of premature babies on feeding tubes — a prohibition that had rankled antiabortion groups — or to include the sharply conservative Breitbart News in a list of news sources despite its history of serving, in the words of its former executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, as the “platform for the alt-right.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore, citing the popularity of the news site and what she called a strong track record of accuracy, said, “It would be an insane oversight to disenfranchise our massive audience that uses Facebook and craves our news content.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But its inclusion has sparked criticism among those who say the move was mainly to address Republican complaints about the company.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I don’t think they do this as a conservative company. I think they do this as a scared company,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York who has worked with Facebook on several media projects.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The price has been high in terms of anger from Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who has promised to lead efforts to break up Facebook should she win the presidency. Liberal financier George Soros, writing recently in the New York Times, called for stripping control of Facebook from Zuckerberg and accused the company of having “an informal mutual assistance operation” with Trump.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Warren issues new disinformation pledge, promising to hold Facebook, Google and Twitter responsible</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet by at least one metric, Facebook’s moves have succeeded — in appeasing a disruptive, unpredictable president. Just last month in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said of Zuckerberg on CNBC, “He’s done a hell of a job.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Power shift in Washington</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Soon after Facebook’s meeting on Project P, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski came to Facebook’s Washington headquarters offering to advise the company on how to handle the new White House, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal matters.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The shifting power in Washington was a serious issue for the company. Its employees had donated just $5,171 to Trump, compared with $1.1 million to fundraising committees affiliated with Democrat Hillary Clinton, with nearly half that amount coming from two of Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and then-chief product officer Chris Cox, according to the political analytics firm GovPredict.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the meeting with Lewandowski sparked outrage within an office still reeling from the election. Particularly upset were several Democrats, including director of U.S. public policy, Catlin O’Neill, a former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the granddaughter of a legendary Pelosi predecessor, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.), said people familiar with the visit and its aftermath.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Facebook decided not to retain Lewandowski,&nbsp;who declined to comment on the details of the visit aside from saying by text, “Please be sure to include the facts that I have never worked for them or been paid by them — they solicited me for a meeting and I attended.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the encounter left many within the company uneasy about what Trump and his allies might do — or perhaps worse, what he might tweet.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The company gradually implemented policies to combat false, misleading news reports through new transparency initiatives and a system of third-party fact-checkers, a move that upset some Republicans. It also adopted its first policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” — essentially using bots, fake accounts or other amplification tactics to manipulate the platform, as Russians and others had in 2016 — and bolstered its security team to police violations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Complaints eventually grew, however, that conservatives were being unfairly targeted by these moves and by long-standing content policies, such as the prohibition against hate speech. Moves to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing media stars Milo Yiannopoulos in 2019 for being “dangerous,” for example, generated allegations of censorship by “Big Tech” among more mainstream conservatives.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As these and other complaints against Facebook grew among Republicans, Trump often amplified them over rival social media platform Twitter, where his following tops 72 million users.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Facebook was always anti-Trump,” he tweeted on Sept. 27, 2017, amid the scandal over Russian efforts to use social media to help elect him. The following month, he added, “Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did. Facebook was on her side, not mine!”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did. Facebook was on her side, not mine!</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump leveled similar charges against other technology companies, as he did in December 2018: “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” But often Facebook bore the brunt of the president’s wrath, as it did after a pair of pro-Trump social media personalities, “Diamond and Silk,” accused the company of censoring them after they received a warning about posting “unsafe” content. (The company later said it had acted in error.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The wonderful Diamond and Silk have been treated so horribly by Facebook. They work so hard and what has been done to them is very sad - and we’re looking into” it, Trump tweeted in May 2019. “It’s getting worse and worse for Conservatives on social media!”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The wonderful Diamond and Silk have been treated so horribly by Facebook. They work so hard and what has been done to them is very sad - and we’re looking into. It’s getting worse and worse for Conservatives on social media!</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2019</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Rising internal GOP clout</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The role of helping the company maneuver through this treacherous new political landscape became a core responsibility for Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, who had joined the company in 2011, after eight years in the Bush White House and a stint as an energy lobbyist.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The former Marine Corps officer had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and, despite supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) for president, met with Trump in December 2016 after the White House expressed interest in having him head the Office of Management and Budget. Kaplan later played a key role in organizing support for Trump Supreme Court pick Brett M. Kavanaugh, a longtime Kaplan friend.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As Trump came to office, Kaplan was a Republican in a company increasingly self-conscious about its oversupply of Democrats in its top ranks. This included Sandberg, who had worked in the Clinton administration and hired numerous friends and former colleagues into Facebook — creating a class of internal allies known informally as “FOSS,” for Friends of Sheryl Sandberg.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kaplan, who had dated Sandberg when they were students at Harvard, managed to be both a FOSS and one of the only Republicans in the room when major decisions got made. The combination lent him credibility when he warned, as he often did, that a looming decision might inflame perilous relations with conservatives.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The rising clout among Facebook’s Republicans went beyond Kaplan. Katie Harbath, a onetime campaign aide to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, gained increased prominence. Kaplan also dispensed with the tradition of having members of both major parties share power atop the Washington office by hiring a fellow Republican, former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, as his deputy — strengthening the conservative cast of the office at its highest levels.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kaplan proved to be adept at assuaging conservative concerns about Facebook. Even before Trump won the presidency, the company faced a crisis in May 2016 when tech publication Gizmodo published a story claiming that contractors managing Facebook’s “Trending” module were suppressing conservative stories.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Kaplan tapped a small team of Republicans, including Harbath, to organize a visit for prominent conservatives, such as political commentators Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, to Facebook headquarters.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg calmed the controversy — at least for a time — but conservatives soon would come back with other complaints.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s the squeaky wheels who get the grease,” said another person familiar with the company’s effort to mollify conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They were the squeaky wheels.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As for the “Trending” topics feature, Facebook fired the contractors described in the Gizmodo story and gave the job for determining “Trending” topics to an algorithm. That allowed the feature to become a vehicle for spreading the false news reports that marred Facebook in the months leading up to the election. One recommended story claimed — falsely — that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had been fired for supporting Clinton.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Russia campaign and fallout</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Security researchers at Facebook found the first signs that Russians were seeking to influence the U.S. election months before the 2016 vote, discovering accounts apparently under control of foreign military hackers....</div></span></div></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Public Policy Director, Global Elections
Facebook
Feb 2011 – Present8 years 9 months
washington d.c. metro area
Am working in the Facebook DC office helping to lead the company's efforts on elections as well as working with elected officials, politicians and governments around the world on how to use Facebook to communicate with constituents/voters.Am working in the Facebook DC office helping to lead the company's efforts on elections as well as working with elected officials, politicians and governments around the world on how to use Facebook to communicate with constituents/voters.




&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Chief Digital Strategist
National Republican Senatorial Committee
Aug 2009 – Mar 20111 year 8 months
In charge of all the online operations at the NRSC for the 2010 cycle.In charge of all the online operations at the NRSC for the 2010 cycle.




&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Director of Online Services
DCI Group
Feb 2008 – Aug 20091 year 7 months



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Deputy eCampaign Director
Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee
Feb 2007 – Jan 20081 year



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Senior Account Manager
DCI Group
2006 – 20071 year



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Communications Director/Press Secretary
US House of Representatives
Oct 2005 – Sep 20061 year



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Associate Director eCommunications
Republican National Committee
Aug 2003 – Oct 20052 years 3 months



Education
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; University of Wisconsin-MadisonUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)Journalism
1999 – 2003



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</font></span></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></div><div><div data-hveid="CAMQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwiVwv--oKTlAhXjHzQIHXfyCZwQFSgAMBB6BAgDEAA"><div class="rc"><div class="r"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/technology/facebook-trump-biden-ad.html" /></font><h3 class="LC20lb"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/technology/facebook-trump-biden-ad.html"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></a><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/technology/facebook-trump-biden-ad.html">Facebook's Hands-Off Approach to Political Speech Gets ...</a></font></font></font></font></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font><div class="TbwUpd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30 bc">https://www.nytimes.com › technology › facebook-trump-biden-ad</cite></font></font></div></span></div><div class="s"><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st"><span class="f">Oct 8, 2019 - </span>... political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Facebook's head of global elections policy, <em>Katie Harbath</em>, wrote in&nbsp;...</span></font></font></font></span></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="st">
</span></font></font></font></span></div></div></div></div></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></span></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></span></div><div><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">Can anyone stop Facebook from poisoning Democracy?

Mark Zuckerberg by Frederic Legrand, Shutterstock

Written by Timothy Karr / Common Dreams October 17, 2019


Freedom (to lie) isn’t free. For the campaign to re-elect Donald Trump it costs $1.5 million a week. And that’s just last week’s tab.
In exchange, Trump’s team gets to spread false and misleading political ads across Facebook’s social network. This includes a 30-second ad that makes the unsubstantiated claim that former Vice President Biden used his influence to block an investigation of a Ukrainian energy company with ties to his son. CNN rejected the ad, noting it contained inaccuracies. But it passed muster with Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, where it’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.



The 2020 election cycle is shaping up to be very lucrative for all the leading tech platforms. Digital political-ad spending is expected to top $2.7 billion before Election Day, according to industry forecasts. Presidential candidates have already spent more than $70 million on Facebook and Google placements, according to data firm Acronym.
Facebook flip flop

All of this cash is great news for online platforms, which are going out of their way to accommodate the rush of campaign ads.


00:01 00:33 




Last month, Facebook changed its policies against misleading ads to give politicians and their campaigns free rein to lie in ads posted on the massive social network. Why bother with fact-checking when there’s easy money in deceptive attack ads?
Under most circumstances, the FCC requires television and radio broadcasters to air political ads by federal candidates; they can’t make decisions based on the content of those candidate ads, whether they’re truthful or not.
Like TV and radio stations, online platforms have no obligation to truth-test political advertising. Yet Facebook once promised to do more than that, pledging that politicians must abide by the same standards as every other advertiser on its site, including the rule that “prohibits ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers.”
That’s changed, and Facebook is painting itself as a champion of First-Amendment freedoms to justify the switch.

“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Facebook’s Katie Harbath explained to the Biden campaign after the company refused to take down the misleading Trump 2020 ad featuring Biden’s son.
But Facebook’s laissez-faire attitude toward political speech has more to do with politics and profits than principle. And it differs dramatically from an earlier commitment by founder Mark Zuckerberg, who told the Senate last year that Facebook wasn’t doing enough to prevent its technology “from being used for harm.”
“It’s not enough to just give people a voice,” he said. “We need to make sure that people aren’t using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation.”
To that end Facebook has deployed A.I. tools that Zuckerberg claims do a better job of identifying accounts that may be trying to interfere in elections. He also pledged to put people first: “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that.”
Until they do, that is.

Facebook’s anti-democracy bias
Zuck’s words aren’t enough for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has some of her own: “Facebook has incredible power to affect elections and our national debate,” the presidential candidate tweeted last Monday, noting that the company is taking “deliberate steps to help one candidate intentionally mislead the American people.”
Facebook’s policy change followed a White House meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in late September. “What did they talk about?” Warren asks. Zuckerberg’s press office won’t say; neither will the White House.

In the meantime, that new and improved A.I. is blocking legitimate news.
Investigative journalist Judd Legum, who first uncovered Facebook’s policy reversal on political ads, last Tuesday reported that Facebook had buried newsworthy posts from a public-radio station in Juneau, Alaska. Facebook claimed that the headline to a post titled “Confused about Juneau’s municipal ballot measures? You’re not alone,” was clickbait, which it forbids.
Last year, Facebook blocked news reports about a hack of its users’ data. Many users found that they couldn’t share stories from legitimate news outlets including the Guardian, Sacramento Bee, and Associated Press.
Despite the chorus from the right claiming anti-conservative bias at the social network, Facebook has a disturbing habit of content-moderation decisions that disproportionately go against social-justice advocates and vulnerable populations. Last year, it blocked an event page for organizers planning a counter-march against a white-supremacist rally that took place in Washington, D.C. The company also removed a post about racism from a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and journalist, though Facebook later apologized and rescinded the block.

The platform has also helped advertisers discriminate. A 2016 ProPublica investigation found that a Facebook ad-targeting tool allowed realtors to restrict who could see housing-related ads based on their “Ethnic Affinities.”
ProPublica later reported that advertisers could use Facebook’s tools to target ads based on people’s self-reported jobs, even if the job was “Jew hater.”
Facebook claims to have subsequently tweaked its tech to prevent advertisers from targeting groups or individuals in ways that could be considered discriminatory. Still, it has no problem with political-advertising content that targets vulnerable communities.
According to research by Media Matters, the company allowed the Trump campaign’s Facebook page to run more than 2,000 ads describing immigrants of color — particularly people from Central and South America — as an “invasion,” a term that white-supremacist groups in the United States frequently use in this context.
Poisoning the well
If all of this is leaving you angry and confused, you’re not alone.
Facebook’s promises to do better typically amount to little in practice. If things continue at this rate, one thing is certain: Facebook will play a significant role in poisoning the well of our democracy… again.
Sen. Warren has called for a new round of congressional hearings and an investigation so Facebook executives can explain what they’re doing to prevent a repeat of 2016 election interference and disinformation. But it’s difficult to see how this might result in new guidelines to curtail deceptive ads in time for it to matter. And existing legislative proposals, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s worthy Honest Ads Act, focus on disclosure of funders and preventing foreign meddling in U.S. elections. They would do little to stem the flood of misleading political ads coming from known, homegrown candidates themselves.
To date, Congress has advanced no privacy legislation that protects voters from having their online data harvested without their consent for targeting by dishonest political campaigns.
Unless Warren or others plan to introduce new legislation, containing provisions that no one has articulated clearly to this point, there seems very little of legal substance for Congress to discuss at an upcoming hearing with Facebook — certainly nothing that that would effectively bar politicians from peddling lies online.
And while Facebook wraps itself in the banner of free expression and political speech, it serves more as a scrim to hide its continued spread of political disinformation to tens of millions of voters in advance of the 2020 elections.
Those naive enough to expect Facebook to do the right thing are ignoring the company’s long history of doing the exact opposite. Facebook now boasts nearly 2.5 billion active users; these users generate four new petabytes of data every day and click “like” 4 million times every minute. Facebook has become too massive to govern itself, and politicians seem too overwhelmed to step into the maelstrom.
But whether and how lawmakers even can step in without running afoul of other cherished principles and legal protections is debatable.
Beyond fixing Facebook
The only real solution to Facebook is one that billions of don’t seem ready to commit to: leaving the social platform altogether.
In the interim, we must consider ways to help create its alternative: content-sharing platforms that don’t hammer at the foundations of democracy.
Earlier this year, Craig Aaron and I proposed a tax on the targeted-advertising revenues that are the economic engine fueling the most dominant online platforms. Proceeds from this tax, estimated at $2 billion a year, would go to a “public-interest media endowment” to support local, independent and noncommercial journalism. Additional funds would help incubate new ideas for gathering and distributing news content, preferably those that don’t rely on the clickbait economy and political-advertising budgets to survive.
All of us must think beyond fixing Facebook to a social-media solution of, by and for the people — not one that protects the powerful and spreads their lies. What we accomplish by the end of 2020 will help determine whether the future of our democracy brightens or dims, and whether our media system becomes an agent of civic engagement or alienation.
To do this requires a dramatic change in the way online platforms work today. Silicon Valley is incapable of cleaning up its toxic mess. More democratic media must help improve political participation, deepen discourse and increase voter turnout. Transparency about political ads is a key element of this shift, but so are efforts to return working journalists to civic-minded beats and limit the damaging effects of disinformation.
These changes must be an intrinsic part of the broader movement to restore democratic norms. A part of that is changing business as usual at platforms that profit from deception.
Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press Action Fund, the advocacy organization that fights for everyone’s rights to connect and communicate. Follow him on Twitter: @TimKarr.

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