Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

Congressional Candidate Calls for Investigation of How Zuckerberg-Funded Nonprofit MCELA Influenced 2020 Election in Michigan

Frank Daniel Miele

  Congressional candidate and current State Representative Steve Carra (R-59) is calling for a legislative investigation into the role of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in funnelling outside money into the 2020 election. Carra is a first-term Republican representative for House District 59 in Southwest Michigan and has been a leader of the movement to audit the November 3 election. “We have the ability and authority to subpoena records and witnesses. I would love to use subpoena powers to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election,” Carra told The Michigan Star in an exclusive interview. The Star broke the story on August 5 of how an obscure nonprofit, the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration (MCELA), received a $12 million grant to support its purported purpose of “nonpartisan voter education” and then turned all but a sliver of the money over to two Democratic political consulting firms for a get-out-the-vote campaign. Benson founded MCELA in 2008 and served as president of the board for most of its existence up to and including 2020, two years after she was elected as secretary of state. Benson’s assistant secretary of state, Heaster Wheeler, also served as a…

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Facebook Suspends ‘Instagram Kids’ Following Investigation Into Platform’s Effect on Teens

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Facebook has paused development of a version of its image-sharing platform Instagram specifically geared towards children, the company announced Monday.

The tech giant decided to suspend work on the project in order to “work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators,” and “demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote in a statement Monday.

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Virginia School District Denies That Voicemail Says ‘Woke Special Services’

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Fairfax County Public Schools bus in parking lot

Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) in Virginia denied that one of its departments calls itself “woke” in an automated voice message, Fox News reported Friday.

“Sorry, woke special services 2 email is not available, record your message at the tone,” the Department of Special Services automated voicemail appeared to say. FCPS said the message actually said “Wok” for one of their administrative centers, Willow Oaks, Fox News reported.

The Department of Special Services organizes into four different offices which includes help with psychology services, student safety and wellness, social work and special education.

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Facebook Reportedly Considers Creating an Election Commission, Just in Time for Midterms

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Facebook is considering creating a commission to advise the tech giant on election-related issues including misinformation, The New York Times reported.

The tech company reportedly contacted several academics and policy experts to draft plans for a commission that will advise Facebook on electoral matters and potentially decide policies related to political misinformation and advertising, several people familiar with the plans told The New York Times. Facebook plans to announce the commission in the next few months to be prepared for the 2022 midterms, the Times reported.

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Commentary: Election Rules Have to Mean Something

RealClearWire

The rule of law must be respected for liberty to be protected.  Changing the rules to achieve a desired outcome undermines both, and when this is done in the administration of elections, democracy itself is imperiled.

Unfortunately, the left shows no compunction about wielding power for partisan advantage, especially when it comes to election administration. They’ve even gone so far as to create new rules to suit their purposes, regardless of whether they possess the authority to do so.

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Fulton County Voters Urge County Commission Not to Approve Contract with Group Allegedly Tied to Mark Zuckerberg

Chris Butler

Several people on Wednesday urged members of the Fulton County Commission not to approve a nearly $600,000 contract with an Illinois-based group to review and assess the county’s voter registration and elections operations. County commissioners had not approved or rejected the proposed contract with this organization, The Elections Group, as of Wednesday evening.

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As Michigan Secretary of State Benson Calls for ‘Educating Voters,’ Questions Surround Zuckerberg-Funded Nonprofit She Founded

Bradley Vasoli

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, speaking remotely to the American Bar Association on Monday, called for “educating voters” about supposed GOP efforts underway to “undermine democracy,” but questions remain regarding her role with the “voter education” efforts of a Mark Zuckerberg-funded nonprofit she founded. 

Benson is a former president of the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration (MCELA), an organization that received $12 million in grants from the D.C.-based Center for Election Innovation and Research.

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CloutHub Founder Jeff Brain Reacts to Trump’s Big Tech Lawsuit

Peter D'Abrosca
Jeff Brain

The founder of CloutHub, a free speech social media network, has responded to former President Donald J. Trump’s class action lawsuit against several Silicon Valley titans, which the forty-fifth president announced Wednesday. 

“I am pleased that President Trump is fighting back against Big Tech corporations after enduring months of blatant injustices,” Jeff Brain said in press release. “His lawsuit is based on the infringement of his fundamental free speech rights that powerful companies such as Facebook and Twitter imposed based on their own political bias; a bias that has no place with such important keepers of our national public square online.”

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Facebook Becomes Fifth Tech Company Worth More Than $1 Trillion

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Facebook’s market capitalization, or total dollar value, closed above $1 trillion for the first time ever Monday, making it the fifth U.S. company to reach such size.

Facebook exceeded the $1 trillion mark after a year in which the company experienced massive user and earnings growth, CNBC reported. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon – all fellow Big Tech companies – are the only other U.S. companies that have also surpassed $1 trillion in market capitalization, according to Axios.

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Memos Hint Zuckerberg to Continue Big Spending on Georgia Election Workers, Infrastructure

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion dollar investment in the 2020 presidential election process may extend into this year or beyond, at least if Fulton County is any measure.

Georgia’s largest county, which encompasses the blue-leaning city of Atlanta, received more than $6.3 million in private grants from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to conduct elections during the 2020 pandemic, but recently reported it did not use all the money last year.

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Emails Show Involvement of Multiple Private Groups in Key Swing-State Cities During 2020 Election

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Newly revealed emails show what appears to be an intensive effort by multiple private advocacy groups to manage numerous aspects of the 2020 election in several swing-state cities key to Biden’s 2020 election victory, shedding further light on the role private initiatives and private funding played in potentially influencing the outcome of that race.

The emails, obtained by the election integrity group the Amistad Project, show exchanges between city officials in several Wisconsin cities and members of the Center for Tech and Civil Life, a left-leaning election advocacy organization based out of Chicago.

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Election Board Says Gubernatorial Candidate’s 2020 Presidential Election Vote Cast, but Not Recorded in His History

Jack Windsor

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Last week a Republican primary candidate for the 2022 Ohio gubernatorial race uncovered that his vote in the 2020 Presidential Election was not reflected in his voter history on the Franklin County Board of Elections (FCBOE) website.

Joe Blystone, a Canal Winchester rancher and first-time political candidate, requested FCBOE investigate the matter.  FCBOE later determined that Blystone’s vote was cast but not recorded in his voter history. 

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Minnesota Voters Want Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Money Investigated

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Alpha News recently reported that eight Minnesota voters petitioned the Minnesota Supreme Court with claims that Minnesota didn’t follow election laws in 2020. As part of their legal effort, these voters are requesting access to data involving Facebook CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s financial influence on how the 2020 election was conducted.

It has been widely reported that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to a nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), that re-granted the funds to thousands of local election officials around the country. From the get-go, even before the election, these donations were controversial.

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Amistad Project Asks Michigan Supreme Court to Preserve Evidence of Election Irregularities

Jason M. Reynolds

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society said it filed a lawsuit on Thanksgiving asking the Michigan Supreme Court to physically secure all evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election and declare the results invalid on the basis of alleged unlawful conduct by state and local officials.

“In numerous instances, state and local officials brazenly violated election laws in order to advance a partisan political agenda,” said Phill Kline, Director of The Amistad Project. “The pattern of lawlessness was so pervasive and widespread that it deprived the people of Michigan of a free and fair election, throwing the integrity of the entire process into question.”

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Amistad Project’s Georgia Lawsuit Targets 200K Ballot Deficit Caused by Improper Counting of Ballots

Jason M. Reynolds

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, saying fraudulent votes cast were 15 times greater than the margin separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

The organization said in a press release that it filed the lawsuit Tuesday, because well over 100,000 illegal votes were improperly counted, while tens of thousands of legal votes were not counted.

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Zuckerberg: FBI Warned Us to Be on the Lookout For a ‘Hack and Leak’ Op with ‘Trove of Docs’ Before the Election

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Wednesday that the FBI warned him months ago that Facebook should be on “heightened alert” about “hack and leak operations” that could be part of a foreign disinformation campaign in the final weeks before the 2020 election.

The Facebook honcho made the remarks during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where he testified alongside Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

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Holocaust Denial Posts Banned on Another Social Media Platform

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Twitter will begin removing posts containing Holocaust denial, a Twitter spokeswoman told Bloomberg News just days after Facebook also implemented a policy banning posts that deny the Holocaust. 

“We strongly condemn anti-semitism, and hateful conduct has absolutely no place on our service,” the spokeswoman told Bloomberg News in a statement. “We also have a robust ‘glorification of violence’ policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust.”

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Commentary: Big Tech Is Breaking Campaign Finance Laws Openly Campaigning on Behalf of Democrats

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A mayoral candidate in Texas was arrested October 8 and charged with 84 counts of mail application ballot fraud; Zul Mohamed, running for mayor of Carrollton, forged nearly one hundred voter registration applications. “At the time of arrest, Mohamed was in the process of stuffing envelopes with additional mail ballot applications for neighboring Dallas County,” law enforcement officials reported. He also was charged with 25 counts of “unlawful possession of an official mail in ballot” and faces up to 20 years in prison.

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Facebook to Ohio Conservative: You Can’t Do That Here

Jack Windsor

Ohioan Vanessa Treft is a political grassroots consultant who has worked in multiple states – Treft is a Trump supporter.

Treft has been outspoken about Ohio’s COVID response – from her grandmother’s inability to receive hydroxychloroquine immediately following a COVID diagnosis, to her calling out Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s refusal to adequately address senior living situations.

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Michigan and Ohio Secretaries of State Endorse Zuckerberg’s Millions Directed to Elections

Corinne Murdock

Michigan and Ohio state secretaries Jocelyn Benson and Frank LaRose endorsed $300 million directed to elections by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. The Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) and Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) announced Tuesday that Zuckerberg and his wife donated in order “to promote safe and reliable voting in states and localities.”

Both Benson and LaRose agreed that the investment was necessary considering the pandemic’s effects on the presidential election. LaRose reposted the press release the day it came out, citing the need for accurate information during voting.

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Zuckerberg Was the Only Tech CEO to Unequivocally Say China Is Stealing American Technology

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the only tech executive at Wednesday’s antitrust hearing who unequivocally said China is stealing technology from American companies.

“I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” the 36-year-old Silicon Valley executive said after Rep. Greg Steube asked him if China is stealing from U.S. technology companies. The Florida Republican posed the same question to CEOs Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sundar Pichai of Google.

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Spotlight on Four Big Tech CEOs Testifying in Competition Probe

The Associated Press

They command corporations with gold-plated brands, millions or even billions of customers, and a combined value greater than the entire German economy. One of them is the world’s richest individual; another is the fourth-ranked billionaire. Their industry has transformed society, linked people around the globe, mined and commercialized users’ personal data, and infuriated critics on both the left and right over speech.

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Project Veritas Exposes Rampant Anti-Conservative Bias of Facebook’s Content Moderators: ‘I Am Going to Delete Them for Terrorism’

Anthony Gockowski

A shocking new undercover video from Project Veritas exposes the rampant anti-conservative bias of Facebook’s content moderators, the employees who are responsible for deciding what posts are censored.

Zach McElroy, a former Facebook employee who worked as a content moderator in Tampa, Florida, told Project Veritas that he’s willing to testify before Congress about Facebook’s bias against Trump supporters and conservative causes.

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Commentary: Big Tech, Privacy, and Power

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The ground is shifting quickly beneath our feet when it comes to tech, privacy, and power. And, although tech companies, their advocates, and even some policymakers, would like us to imagine these issues are cut and dried, they are not.

In their book The Sovereign Individual, published on the eve of the year 2000, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg attempt to grapple with the forthcoming technological changes that the new millennium inevitably would bring. “As technology revolutionizes the tools we use,” they wrote, “it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.”

This is the dynamic that has been unfolding slowly over the last 20 years, as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have transformed how we engage with communications, culture, commerce, and one another.

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Facebook Takes Down Anti-Quarantine Protest Posts That ‘Defy’ Social Distancing Guidelines

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Facebook is not allowing anti-quarantine protesters to use the site to organize demonstrations in states that have enacted strict social distancing measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The social media giant has already removed promotions for anti-quarantine events in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska in cooperation with those state governments.

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Commentary: ‘High-Skilled Immigrants Act’ Is a Sop to Big Tech

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by Rachael Brovard   In a rare moment of bipartisanship last week, Democrats and Republicans joined hands to make a small, but fundamental change to our immigration system. Not to provide critically needed updates or wholesale reforms, but, rather, to toss a sop to the billionaires of Big Tech. Thanks to furious lobbying from Microsoft, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Equifax, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, IBM, Cisco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt of Google’s group FWD.us, among others, the House this week passed H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019. The bill, which was supported by 140 Republicans and 224 Democrats, removes the per-country cap for employment-based immigration visas. In other words, it makes it easier for the tech giants and billionaires of Silicon Valley to hire cheap foreign labor over highly skilled Americans. Current law requires that no country receive more than 7 percent of the employment-based green cards issued each year. This ensures that employment-based visas are limited to a global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors – and prevents one or two countries from dominating the distribution. The practical effect is that individuals from countries with high demand for…

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Facebook Plans Its Own Currency for 2 Billion-Plus Users

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  Facebook already rules daily communication for more than two billion people around the world. Now it wants its own currency, too. The social network unveiled an ambitious plan Tuesday to create a new digital currency similar to Bitcoin for global use, one that could drive more e-commerce on its services and boost ads on its platforms. But the effort, which Facebook is launching with partners including PayPal, Uber, Spotify, Visa and Mastercard, could also complicate matters for the beleaguered social network. Facebook is currently under federal investigation over its privacy practices, and along with other technology giants also faces a new antitrust probe in Congress. Creating its own globe-spanning currency — one that could conceivably threaten banks, national currencies and the privacy of users — isn’t likely to dampen regulators’ interest in Facebook. The digital currency, called Libra, is scheduled to launch sometime in the next six to 12 months. Facebook is taking the lead on building Libra and its underlying technology; its more than two dozen partners will help fund, build and govern the system. Facebook hopes to raise as much as $1 billion from existing and future partners to support the effort. Company officials emphasized Libra as…

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Facebook Is Promoting ISIS Propaganda, Whistleblower Says

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by Chris White   Facebook is promoting Islamic State propaganda, a whistleblower alleges in a complaint Thursday to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The social media company is likely violating securities laws prohibiting companies from misleading shareholders and the public, according to a petition filed by the National Whistleblower Center (NWC). The complaint includes a study that shows Facebook used its auto-generating feature to produce videos that inadvertently help detail ISIS’s exploits throughout the year. One video begins the black flags of jihad and then cycles highlights of social media posts from a user calling himself “Abdel-Rahim Moussa, the Caliphate.” It then contains plaques of anti-Semitic verses, and a picture of men carrying more jihadi flags while they burn the American flag. One profile of an al-Qaeda affiliated group listed the users’ employer as Facebook. The video concludes with the salutation. “Thanks for being here, from Facebook,” the video concludes before flashing the company’s “thumbs up” image. Researchers monitored the Facebook pages of users in 2018 who affiliated themselves with groups the U.S. has designated as terrorist groups. Nearly 38 percent of the posts with symbols of extremist groups were removed, their research showed. Much of the banned content cited…

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Facebook’s Co-Founder Calls for Government to Break Up Zuckerberg’s Empire

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by Chris White   Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes thrashed CEO Mark Zuckerberg Thursday and called on the federal government to break up enormous sections of the massive social media company. “The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech,” Hughes wrote in a New York Times editorial. The company is “far too big and far too powerful,” he explained, noting that Zuckerberg often used to talk about dominating other social media competitors. “There’s no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people,” Hughes wrote of his former college roommate, noting later: “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.” Hughes, who helped create Facebook’s now-famous News Feed, left the company in 2007 and sold all of his shares in 2012, a decision that netted him half a billion dollars. Hughes offered several controversial ideas to help break up the empire he helped build, such as requiring the Federal Trade Commission to reverse mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp, which he claims the agency “incorrectly approved.” He also wants Congress to create a new agency to regulate technology in addition to the FTC. “The agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on…

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