A Reckoning For Facebook / Zuckerberg?

The Senate hearing today on Facebook's destructive "profit over people" philosophy featuring former Facebook executive Frances Haugen should expose more of chief executive Mark "Faceberg" Zuckerberg and his team's undermining of democratic institutions for profit through promoting hate speech and disinformation. Facebook is expected to fight back aggressively to defend those profits in the face of potential regulation. From the Washington Post:

"After four years of almost continuous scandal, Facebook is approaching its latest controversy over political polarization and the toxic effects of social media in a more aggressive and defiant way than it has previously, say current and former employees, including executives who helped shape the company’s earlier responses.

Gone is the familiar script in which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg issues a formal apology — sometimes in long blogs on his personal Facebook page or over live-streamed video for a Congressional hearing — then takes responsibility and promises change.

In its place, the company has deployed a slate of executives to mount a public defense while quibbling with the details of allegations from Frances Haugen, the former project manager who left Facebook with tens of thousands of documents. Those documents detail the company’s research into how it spreads hate, incites violence, and, through its Instagram subsidiary, contributes to teenage girls’ negative body images and suicidal thoughts."   (our emphasis)

Part of Haugen's accusations are that Zuckerberg and his executive team mislead investors about the size of its audience, something she revealed in her explosive "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday. Haugen also is alleging Facebook and Instagram allowed the promotion of human trafficking. From CBS News:

"The filings, submitted by Haugen's lawyers, state, 'Our anonymous client is disclosing original evidence showing that Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) has, for years past and ongoing, violated U.S. securities laws by making material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors and prospective investors, including, inter alia, through filings with the SEC, testimony to Congress, online statements and media stories.' [snip]

Among the allegations in the SEC filings are claims that Facebook and Instagram were aware in 2019 that the platforms were being used to 'promote human trafficking and domestic servitude.' The filings also allege Facebook 'failed to deploy internally-recommended or lasting counter-measures' to combat misinformation and violent extremism related to the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection."  (our emphasis)

A trillion dollar company like Facebook can afford top lawyers and lobbyists, and they'll be deployed to fight these latest accusations. Then again, the days when Facebook and its executive team could skirt responsibility in pursuit of profits may be numbered after all. 

BONUS:  Here's Blaire Erskine's take on a Facebook response (with a brilliant swipe using "automatic friend" Tom [Anderson] of Myspace) --

 

Statement from Facebook pic.twitter.com/uCCZbPnyHW

— blaire erskine (@blaireerskine) October 4, 2021

 

(photo: Zuckerberg, left, and Frances Haugen. AFP and AP)

QOTD -- Facebook's Addiction To Lies And Hate Speech

"By the time thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol in January, organized in part on Facebook and fueled by the lies about a stolen election that had fanned out across the platform, it was clear from my conversations that the Responsible AI team had failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it had never made those problems its main focus. More important, I realized, if it tried to, it would be set up for failure.

"The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth... [snip]

"In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price." -- Karen Hao, in "How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation, " today at Technology Review.com.  This is a deep dive into how Facebook's algorithms nurture lies and hate speech, and why the Facebook executive who created them is powerless to fix the problem.  Fascinating reading.

 

QOTD -- Priorities

“This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims... if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.” -- Sacha Baron Cohen torching Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg while accepting the Anti- Defamation League's International Leadership Award yesterday.  Cohen does a searing, compelling job of painting a broader picture of the danger of social media giants ("the Silicon six") spreading despicable lies, fear and outrage to billions around the world.  The video of Cohen's thoughtful speech is embedded at the link -- go watch it, please.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The New York Times had several interrelated articles over the weekend on the use/ abuse of Twitter by the Twit- in- Chief, Donald "The Dumb Don" Trump.  Although we already sense much of what the Times is reporting, there's some exhaustive analysis of Trump's Twitter habits, including what kinds of things the moron is absorbing into his Very Good Brain:

...Mr. Trump, whose own tweets have warned of deep-state plots against him, accused the House speaker of treason and labeled Republican critics “human scum,” has helped spread a culture of suspicion and distrust of facts into the political mainstream.

The president is also awash in an often toxic torrent that sluices into his Twitter account — roughly 1,000 tweets per minute, many intended for his eyes. Tweets that tag his handle, @realDonaldTrump, can be found with hashtags like #HitlerDidNothingWrong, #IslamIsSatanism and #WhiteGenocide. While filters can block offensive material, the president clearly sees some of it, because he dips into the frothing currents and serves up noxious bits to the rest of the world.

By retweeting suspect accounts, seemingly without regard for their identity or motives, he has lent credibility to white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots and obscure QAnon adherents like VB Nationalist, an anonymous account that has promoted a hoax about top Democrats worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking.  [snip]

Authentic or not, the most fervent MAGA and QAnon accounts — at least 23,000 of his followers have QAnon references in their profiles — form a dependable Greek chorus that exploits the tricks of the medium to amplify the president’s message. Mr. Trump benefits from the activism of his online supporters and the platform’s algorithms, which tend to reward the most partisan content within digital communities.

But the constant exposure to the worst elements of social media poses risks. Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and a cybersecurity expert who studies propaganda campaigns on social media, said the time Mr. Trump spent on Twitter “gives you an amazing opportunity to game the president.”

It's easy to game a narcissistic moron, it turns out. The other related articles are here and here.

Will Bunch has a good read about what's going on with the riots in Chile over it's world- highest level of income inequality (the U.S. is second), and how the decades- long influence of the right- wing economists of the "Chicago school" has brought their economy to this point.  He then ties it in to current U.S. politics:

And what about Chile’s rival for income inequality, the United States? While there have been significant protest movements over income inequality (Occupy Wall Street) and its symptoms (the March for Our Lives, climate strikes, the Women’s March), the last few years have shown that Americans remain a people who pin a lot of our hopes, for better or worse, on the ballot box, not on the street. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren rises in the Democratic polls and her ideological cousin Sen. Bernie Sanders enjoys something of a bounce back, the chances are growing in the United States for a political revolution that could undo Chicago Boys-style governance here at home, without damaging any subway stations in the process.

And yet this nonviolent revolution still has America’s billionaire class in a total panic.

In recent weeks, Wall Street and other big-money political funders have run to their favorite journalists -- who’ve responded with headlines like Politico’s “Corporate America freaks out over Elizabeth Warren” -- and floated delusional, desperation theories that some benevolent billionaire like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or some other plutocrat could still enter the 2020 race at 11:58 and somehow save their pampered skins.

“Ninety-seven percent of the people I know in my world are really, really fearful of her,” billionaire Michael Novogratz told Bloomberg (heh) News recently of Warren, but the wealthy acknowledge that every time they attack Warren, Sanders, or their proposals such as a wealth tax to fund social programs like universal prekindergarten, eliminating college debt or universal health care, it only makes the chances for their victory stronger.

That’s because you don’t need to fly a helicopter over the streets of Santiago to see that there’s a lot more of us than there are of them. The Milton Friedmans and the James Buchanans of this world were able to get away for decades with their ridiculous theories that freedom for billionaires would eventually trickle down dollars on regular folks -- until the day we woke up and discovered we didn’t even have enough change for the subway. The fires may have started in the shadow of the Andes, but you can already smell the smoke up on Wall Street.

That's a long excerpt, but there's much more at the link that deserves a read.

Eric Boehlert explores why Facebook's Mark Suckerberg Zuckerberg is so resistant to policing or removing lies being spread by Republicans on his platform:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a GOP charm offensive, and it seems to be working for the social media behemoth as it makes its allegiance to the Republican Party more open. In the days preceding his latest testimony before Congress, Zuckerberg had been "hosting a series of dinners with conservative journalists, right-wing celebrities, and at least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who grilled Zuckerberg about Facebook’s market dominance when he testified in a Senate hearing last year," Politico reported. Among those who attended the conservative-only dinners at Zuckerberg’s home were Fox News' Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, radio host Hugh Hewitt, Guy Benson of Townhall, and Byron York of the Washington Examiner. All of them function as public apologists for Donald Trump, who has spent years bullying Facebook for supposedly trying to "censor" conservative voices.

Facebook's reward for that outreach effort came last week when "Republican members of the committee were generally more supportive of Mr. Zuckerberg," when he appeared before Congress, The New York Times reported.

Indeed, Facebook's political transformation from a quasi-progressive outpost that revolutionized information sharing into a bullied GOP lapdog now seems complete, as the company gives Republicans a green light to use the social media platform to lie their way through Trump's re-election campaign next year and create a sea of online disinformation. "Facebook is actively helping Trump spread lies and misinformation," Elizabeth Warren warned this month. "Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once. They might do it again—and profit off of it."

There's no question about the profit part. "Trump’s reelection campaign is far outspending other candidates on Facebook ads and boosted posts—to the tune of more than $20.7 million between May 2018 and October 2019, more than all the Democratic presidential candidates combined," Slate reports.

Zuckerberg is an image- conscious phony, so it's possible the blowback he's getting, including from his own employees, plus Twitter's decision not to have political ads on its platform, will cause him to change course. Recode's Kara Swisher is one who thinks so.  The pressure needs to stay on, though.

Our neighbors in Virginia have an important off- year election tomorrow that will determine the composition of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate. We need three seats in the House and two in the Senate to take control.  Here's some of what that would mean:

Democratic takeovers in both legislative chambers would have far-reaching implications for the state’s policies and politics. The party, which also controls the governor’s office, would have the chance to pursue a host of liberal priorities like an increase in the state’s minimum wage, laws protecting LGBTQ rights and abortion rights and tougher gun safety regulations.

It would also mark the culmination of Virginia’s yearslong transformation from a conservative state ― which once was the seat of the Confederacy ― to a progressive one that is not only reliably Democratic in presidential elections, but whose state politics are heavily influenced by a cohort of liberal Democrats that would have been unrecognizable even a decade ago.

Vote!

As usual, we are recommending you take time to check out Infidel 753's link round- up (where we found that piece on Facebook/Zuckerberg).  His blog is worth bookmarking, if you haven't already done so!

"Dear Mr. Zuckerberg..."

The parents of a Sandy Hook elementary school victim have something to say to amoral Facebook founder Mark "F*ckerberg" Zuckerberg:

Dear Mr Zuckerberg,  

Our names are Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa. We are the parents of Noah, who on 14 December, 2012, at the age of six, was gunned down in his classroom at Sandy Hook elementary school. Since that day, we, as well as the parents, family, and friends of the 25 other victims, have been embroiled in a constant battle with social media providers, including Facebook, to protect us from harassment and threats. [snip] 

While terms you use, like “fake news” or “fringe conspiracy groups”, sound relatively innocuous, let me provide you with some insight into the effects of allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate. We have endured online, telephone, and in-person harassment, abuse, and death threats. In fact, one of the abusers was sentenced to jail for credible death threats that she admitted in court she had uttered because she believed in online content created by these “fringe groups”. In order to protect ourselves and our surviving children, we have had to relocate numerous times. These groups use social media, including Facebook, to “hunt” us, posting our home address and videos of our house online. We are currently living in hiding. We are far from alone in our experiences, as many other families who have lost loved ones in mass shootings and other tragedies have reported the same continuing torment. 

Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected. What makes the entire situation all the more horrific is that we have had to wage an almost inconceivable battle with Facebook to provide us with the most basic of protections to remove the most offensive and incendiary content.

You can read the entire, heartbreaking open letter here.

A main purveyor of the Sandy Hook hoax hate speech is, of course, Alex Jones -- who also recently made threats of physical violence against Special Counsel Robert Mueller via Facebook and YouTube.  That, too, is apparently something F*ckerberg considers not violating Facebook's rules.

Facebook and F*ckerberg are not your friends.

Also, what Chris Hayes said:

Facebook is the equivalent of a massively profitable factory that just dumps all of its waste into the river and never has to pay for the cost to clean it up.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 25, 2018

BONUS:  Sad!  Facebook's stock plummeted 23% today in after- hours trading based on lower quarterly earnings than expected. F*ckerberg personally lost $17.6 billion in the sell off.  Sweet.

Cambridge Analytica's Web Of Bribes, Blackmail, Sex And Data Piracy

Cambridge Analytica, a ratfucking "strategic data" British firm funded by the ultra- right American Mercer family, has been deeply enmeshed in the Trump- Russia scandal.  It's finding itself up to its bollocks in even hotter water, as reported by Britain's Channel 4:

An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers. 

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers. 

In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors. 

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”. 

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

You don't have to be conversant in British or American law to suspect that these right- wing douchebags (the company was the brainchild of, who else, über douchebag Steve Bannon) have broken several laws in the pursuit of power at all costs.

This, of course follows recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of more than 50 million Facebook profiles in order to better target those users in a massive disinformation campaign designed to help un- indicted co- conspirator Donald "Rump" Trump:

Facebook and the analytics company that worked with Donald Trump’s election team have come under mounting pressure, with calls for investigations and hearings to explain a vast data breach that affected tens of millions of people. 

In Britain, the head of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news accused Cambridge Analytica and Facebook of misleading MPs after revelations in the Observer that more than 50m Facebook profiles were harvested and used to build a system that may have influenced voters in the 2016 presidential campaign. [snip] 

“This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users, whether it acquired that information illegally and whether it sought to abuse that information in support of President Trump’s political campaign in the United States or Brexit in the United Kingdom,” he told the Guardian. 

“The company has repeatedly touted its ability to influence voters through ‘psychographic’ targeting and has claimed it was the fundamental reason that Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Indeed, it may be that through Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign made use of illegitimately acquired data on millions of Americans in order to help sway the election.” 

Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than $6.2m, according to Federal Election Commission records. It denies using any Facebook data in the campaign.

Between the British prosecutors and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, we eagerly anticipate further unraveling of the massive corruption and illegality that this Rump surrogate operation represents. Let the frog marching begin!

BONUS:  Charles Pierce sums it up --

There simply was nothing about the Trump campaign that wasn’t rotten at its core. The candidate himself and most of his advisers had a positive gift for finding the most rancid operatives available to do the most rancid kind of work. By the time the election rolled around, the whole Trump operation had rats in its brains and poisonous spiders in its blood. It produced not a presidency, but a wart-ridden golem of a presidency, wandering and staggering around the landscape with bits of its pestiferous flesh falling into the public prints every day. Good Christ, what has this country done?

BONUS II:  Here's the video exposé from Channel 4 with the Cambridge Analytica crime bosses talking about their methods--

Monday Reading

Our standard request:  please go to the links to read the full articles.

Robert Kuttner has a good read about the noose closing around Putin asset Donald "Rump" Trump (and why all he can realistically do at this point is what he's doing:  tweeting misdirection and lies):

In this case, Trump and his family relied on massive bailouts of his failing business enterprises from Russian oligarchs close to the Kremlin. When he became a presidential candidate, the Russians treated him as an asset ― a useful idiot, as Stalinists used to put it. And when the campaign finalists turned out to be Trump versus the hard-line Clinton, the Russians sought to destroy her and elect Trump. Trump, meanwhile, became the most pro-Russia president in U.S. history, refusing to breathe a word of criticism of Putin, behaving like the head of a client state. This much of the story is hidden in plain view.

The details ― of Russian financing of Trump’s businesses, and of more campaign contacts ― are likely to be spelled out in further indictments, almost surely including members of Trump’s family, and in Mueller’s final report, which will look very much like a bill of impeachment. (our emphasis)

What do the Russians have on Rump that makes him their stooge?  Follow the money.

On Friday, Facebook vice president of ads Rob Goldman made this extraordinary, and extraordinarily ignorant, claim:

Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election.  I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.

— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018

This "don't blame us for Trump, please!" self- serving nonsense was, of course, picked up by the Master of Self- Serving Nonsense:

“I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”
Rob Goldman
Vice President of Facebook Ads https://t.co/A5ft7cGJkE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018

Both Rump and the Facebook suits have a common interest, as Anne Applebaum notes:

Facebook executives and Pro-Trump Republicans now have a shared interest: both groups are desperate to prove that Russian computational propaganda did not impact the election https://t.co/3TCKfqWUMz

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) February 18, 2018

On CNN, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper addressed Goldman's breezy denial of the obvious (via Vox):

In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash on Saturday, the general hit back at Goldman’s assertion. “Well, it’s false, as far as I’m concerned, because there’s no question what the Russians were trying to do,” Clapper said, noting that all evidence points to that being the case, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. “Clearly, the Russians were trying to affect the election.” (our emphasis)

We'll take Clapper's assessment over dudebro's. All the platforms, including Facebook, that were tools of the Russian effort need to step up and acknowledge their role and stop deflection, denial and delay in responding to the continuing attacks on our democracy. Facebook's Goldman, in his particular position, seems to be a weak link at best and an obstructor at worst.

As far as looking ahead, The Atlantic's David Frum (we know, we know) wonders how far Rump would go to foil Democrats in 2018 and beyond, given his blatant lack of interest in securing our election systems and his silent partner in Moscow:

Trump’s own tweets reveal that among the things he most fears is the prospect of Representative Adam Schiff gaining the gavel of the House Intelligence Committee from the clownish present chairman, Devin Nunes. How far would Trump go to stop a dreaded political opponent, inside the law and outside? How far has Donald Trump gone in the past? 

Trump continues to insist that he and his campaign team did not collude with Russia in the 2016 election. We know that they were ready and eager to collude—that’s on the public record. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”) The public does not yet know whether the collusion actually occurred, and if so, in what form and to what extent. But in front of our very eyes we can observe that they are leaving the door open to Russian intervention on their behalf in the next election. You might call it collusion in advance—a dereliction of duty as grave as any since President Buchanan looked the other way as Southern state governments pillaged federal arsenals on the eve of the Civil War.  (our emphasis)

Holding onto power is all Rump and his fellow thugs, crooks and malefactors (i.e., the Republican Party and their plutocrat sponsors) are interested in, to hell with the United States.  None so far have shown that they have a patriotic bone in their bodies and don't seem likely to grow any.

Finally, we also recommend taking a look at the link round- up at Infidel 753 for the most comprehensive collection of news, thought pieces, oddities and fun stuff.

The Silicon Valley's New Right-Wing Players

Salon's RJ Eskow has 6 examples of offensive actions or statements  by some of America's new "titans" of industry, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Marissa Mayer.  We're highlighting these two in particular because they're leaders in a cutting-edge industry (information technology for lack of a better term) that one supposes would be led by forward-thinking, progressive people, right?  Um, not necessarily.

On Krispy Kreme Christie bud (and baby libertarian?) Mark Zuckerberg's super-PAC:

The super-PAC’s first initiative is supposed to be immigration reform. But the group’s been running ads and making other efforts to support a hard-right political agenda, directly and through subsidiaries called Americans for Conservative Action and Council for American Job Growth. One ad features conservative Republican Marco Rubio. Others oppose Obamacare and promote the environmentally destructive Keystone XL pipeline.

On Marissa Mayer's participation on the Walmart board of directors and Google's involvement in far-right causes:

Mayer had the chance to meet with Walmart workers who were unjustly fired after protesting the corporation’s policies, but she refused to speak with them. She had them arrested instead.

Mayer’s public silence doesn’t just extend to mistreated Walmart workers. She prefers to let others do her political talking, too. Yahoo! is part of Zuckerberg’s right-wing super-PAC. It also reportedly remained in the Koch brothers far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), even after many other corporations publicly left the group over its extremist policies.

Apparently, Silicon Valley is in some danger of turning into Galt's Gulch.