{"id":175959,"date":"2020-10-12T18:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/12\/facebook-is-ineluctably-evil\/"},"modified":"2020-10-12T18:11:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T23:11:00","slug":"facebook-is-ineluctably-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/10\/12\/facebook-is-ineluctably-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook is Ineluctably Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a company discussion board, a Facebook employee noted that senior management had repeatedly reversed decisions to flag conservative groups and media for posting false and deceptive information, and  was promptly fired<\/a>. <\/p>\n

So much for social media having a liberal bias.<\/p>\n

Also, this should be a lesson for the Dems:  Oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg care about nothing but themselves.  They are not to be trusted.<\/p>\n

Seeing as how the US has not done what Yeltsin did when he selected his oligarchs, he overwhelmingly selected them from a despised minority, Jews, so that he would have public support if he needed to take them down.  (He didn’t, but Putin did.)<\/p>\n

Break up Facebook:<\/p>\n

After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain<\/a> what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think we\u2019re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,\u201d one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company\u2019s internal communication platform, earlier this week.<\/p>\n

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules \u2014 as on Wednesday when it removed a video post<\/a> from the president in which he claimed that children are \u201calmost immune\u201d to COVID-19<\/a> \u2014 there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.<\/p>\n

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart\u2019s page<\/a>, though other accounts continued to share it.<\/p>\n

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

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

But some of Facebook\u2019s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart \u2014 along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University<\/a> \u2014 has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company\u2019s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Breitbart escalation marked \u2018urgent: end of day\u2019 was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart\u2019s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,\u201d the employee wrote.<\/p>\n

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for \u201cpriority\u201d escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company\u2019s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush\u2019s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Past Facebook employees, including Ya\u00ebl Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplan\u2019s influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News<\/a> a member of Kaplan’s Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization.<\/p>\n

Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears that policy people have been intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers, to avoid them getting repeat-offender status,\u201d wrote another employee in the company\u2019s internal \u201cmisinformation policy\u201d discussion group.<\/p>\n

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company\u2019s \u201crespectful communication policy.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bullsh%$.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg has absolute authority over Facebook, and Joel Kaplan is his guy, and has no authority beyond what Zuckerberg gives him.<\/p>\n

Psychopaths like Mark Zuckerberg is why anti-trust law was created.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a company discussion board, a Facebook employee noted that senior management had repeatedly reversed decisions to flag conservative groups and media for posting false and deceptive information, and  was promptly fired.  So much for social media having a liberal bias. Also, this should be a lesson for the Dems:  Oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg care …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,479,374,437,598],"class_list":["post-175959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-evil","tag-monopoly","tag-politics","tag-regulation","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}