A group directly linked to Mark Zuckerberg donated nearly $12 million to a Michigan nonprofit to help state residents vote absentee for the 2020 presidential election. Zuckerberg and his associates donated the money with the blessing of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Read the full story
A group directly linked to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated nearly $5.6 million to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office last year. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger spent that money on the 2020 presidential election.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss the unconstitutional election laws passed by Pennsylvania’s legislature and governor.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the Tennessee Star’s National Correspondent live from Washington, D.C. Neil W. McCabe to the newsmakers line to discuss Georgia’s election fraud and Republican negligence.
Read the full story
Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Director of the Amistad Project Phill Kline to the newsmakers line to discuss the lack of transparency in the current election process and the billionaire dollars behind it.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed public affairs strategist Clint Brewer to the show to analyze Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments on the 2020 election results’ timeline.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed speculation that he and President Donald Trump have come to an understanding in an interview published Monday.
“I’ve heard this speculation, too, so let me be clear: There’s no deal of any kind,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Axios published Monday.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
Billionaire financier George Soros stepped up his campaign Tuesday to thwart what he says is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to help President Donald Trump win reelection in 2020.
Read the full story
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has authoritarian views on misinformation and likely intends on reelecting President Donald Trump.
“Google took it off YouTube … so I contacted Facebook,” Clinton told The Atlantic in a report published Saturday.
Read the full story
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer compared fighting “hate speech” to Detroit’s industrial efforts during World War II in a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week.
Read the full story
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other liberal pundits on Twitter railed against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for reportedly dining with President Donald Trump recently amid political ad controversy.
Read the full story
Facebook said it removed tens of millions of posts that broke its rules regarding child pornography, hate speech and harassment in a Wednesday transparency report.
Read the full story
Facebook officially rolled out its Facebook News tab Friday to a select number of U.S. users, according to a blog post.
Read the full story
WASHINGTON – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded on Wednesday that the company’s planned digital currency Libra was a “risky project,” but sought to reassure skeptical U.S. lawmakers that it could lower the cost of electronic payments and open up the global financial system to more people.
Read the full story
Facebook announced Monday an effort to “protect the 2020 U.S. elections” by clearly marking fake news posts, offering protections to politicians’ accounts and offering more transparency.
Read the full story
In an interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that he believes private social media companies should not censor politicians.
Read the full story
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that he met recently with conservative pundits recently to get a “wide range of viewpoints” from people ahead of the 2020 election.
Read the full story
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg vowed in leaked audio to “go to the mat” with 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren if she beats President Donald Trump.
Read the full story
This past Thursday, Facebook suspended my personal account for three days after I shared a link to Rush Limbaugh’s website, where the nationally syndicated radio host commented on the new movie “The Hunt.”
Read the full story
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…
Read the full story
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…
Read the full story
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…
Read the full story
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…
Read the full story
by George Rasley In a dystopian future envisioned by some of science fiction’s greatest authors, mankind is ruled not by elected leaders or by warlords who came to power through victory in battle. Instead, humans have become the virtual slaves of soulless totalitarian corporations that vie with each other for control of resources and populations. If you think that bizarre form of fascism is impossible or so unlikely to succeed that you don’t have to worry about it consider the following developments from the past few months. Facebook, the world’s largest social media “platform” has permanently banned a group of ostensibly conservative writers and thinkers it has labeled purveyors of “hate” and “dangerous individuals.” Among those banned are Alex Jones, host of InfoWars, its UK editor Paul Joseph Watson, ex-Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, former Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, and independent journalist Laura Loomer. Keep in mind none of these individuals have killed anyone, threatened to kill someone or committed any crime of incitement or assault – it is their ideas, not their actions that are deemed to be “dangerous” by Facebook dictator Mark Zuckerberg. Not only are those individuals banned, but any reference to them or links to…
Read the full story
Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it may have “unintentionally uploaded” email contacts of 1.5 million new users since May 2016, in what seems to be the latest privacy-related issue faced by the social media company. In March, Facebook had stopped offering email password verification as an option for people who signed up for the first time, the company said. There were cases in which email contacts of people were uploaded to Facebook when they created their account, the company said. “We estimate that up to 1.5 million people’s email contacts may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we are deleting them,” Facebook told Reuters, adding that users whose contacts were imported will be notified. The underlying glitch has been fixed, according to the company statement. Business Insider had earlier reported that the social media company harvested email contacts of the users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts. When an email password was entered, a message popped up saying it was “importing” contacts without asking for permission first, the report said. Facebook has been hit by a number of privacy-related issues recently, including a glitch that exposed passwords of millions of users…
Read the full story
Facebook was charged with discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of its ad-targeting system. HUD said Thursday Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map and giving advertisers the option of showing ads only to men or only to women. The agency also claims Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude people that the social media company classified as parents; non-American-born; non-Christian; interested in accessibility; interested in Hispanic culture or a wide variety of other interests that closely align with the Fair Housing Act’s protected classes. HUD, which is pursuing civil charges and potential monetary awards that could run into the millions, said Facebook’s ad platform is “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” because it allows advertisers to exclude people who they don’t want to see their ads. The claim from HUD comes less than a week after Facebook said it would overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement with a group that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Fair Housing Alliance and others. The technology at the heart…
Read the full story
by Michelle Quinn Facebook says it is getting better at proactively removing hate speech and changing the incentives that result in the most sensational and provocative content becoming the most popular on the site. The company has done so, it says, by ramping up its operations so that computers can review and make quick decisions on large amounts of content with thousands of reviewers making more nuanced decisions. In the future, if a person disagrees with Facebook’s decision, he or she will be able to appeal to an independent review board. Facebook “shouldn’t be making so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters Thursday. But as Zuckerberg detailed what the company has accomplished in recent months to crack down on spam, hate speech and violent content, he also acknowledged that Facebook has far to go. “There are issues you never fix,” he said. “There’s going to be ongoing content issues.” Company’s actions In the call, Zuckerberg addressed a recent story in The New York Times that detailed how the company fought back during some of its biggest controversies over the past two years, such as…
Read the full story
by Grace Carr A number of plaintiffs filed a formal complaint Tuesday, alleging Facebook knew about problematic measurement tactics of video viewership and did nothing to address the problem for at least a year. Tuesday’s complaint comes after a 2016 lawsuit against the company that alleges it engaged in fraud and deception by failing to disclose its faulty measurement system sooner. Facebook acknowledged in September 2016 that it “found an error in the way [it] calculate[s] one of the video metrics” on its dashboard by excluding videos that were less than three seconds long to calculate “average duration of video viewed.” That exclusion inflated reported average viewership times by 60 to 80 percent, according to Fortune. Video ads are an important source of revenue for online publications that rely on advertising to generate profit. Video ad spending will account for roughly a quarter of U.S. digital ad spending in 2018, according to eMarketer. Facebook will also capture nearly 25 percent of all U.S. video ad revenue in 2018, eMarketer reports. Facebook’s video viewership numbers inspired news companies to move toward increased video production. ATTN, MTV News and other news companies reportedly fired writers and editors so they could “pivot” to video production, according to Adweek.…
Read the full story
Facebook has set itself up as the final arbiter of what is news and what is not, what is real and what is fake, a virtual referee with the power to promote certain articles while sending others down the memory hole, never to be seen by the reading public. But it is only the providers of conservative news who are unhappy with Facebook’s new extreme vetting process, launched in reaction to accusations that its site was used by the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential elections. Facebook removed three Tennessee Star articles Thursday morning that were critical of former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, the Democrat nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in this November’s election, from The Tennessee Star Facebook page. By early Thursday afternoon, all three of those articles mysteriously reappeared on The Tennessee Star Facebook page, along with four other articles that had also been removed early Thursday. All told, seven Tennessee Star articles that were posted on The Tennessee Star Facebook page shortly after midnight Thursday morning magically reappeared on The Tennessee Star Facebook page 12 hours later, at about 12:45 p.m. central time Thursday. One can only surmise that it took that amount of time for Facebook fact-checkers to pore over the stories with a fine-toothed comb, looking…
Read the full story
by Mike Gonzalez Less than a third of the way into his upcoming book on nationalism, Israeli philosopher and scholar Yoram Hazony warns about the growing censorship constricting debate in Western societies when the opinion in question runs counter to the views of politically correct liberalism. Facebook wasted no time in making his case for him. “There is a sense today throughout the Western world that one’s beliefs on controversial matters should no longer be discussed openly,” Hazony writes in “The Virtue of Nationalism,” to be published by Basic Books in September, adding: We are now aware that we must think a second and third time before acting or speaking. … Genuine diversity in the constitutional or religious character of Western nations persists only at mounting costs to those who insist on their freedom. The observation was prescient, and Hazony is now facing these costs. Facebook has blocked ads for Hazony’s book ostensibly because, as an announcement informed him: “Your ad was not approved because your Page has not been authorized to run ads with political content.” According to Facebook’s own definition, however, political content is support for candidates, legislation, ballot questions, etc. Having spent part of a North Carolina…
Read the full story
by George Rasley Conservatives who have suffered discrimination from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook will derive a little bit of pleasure from recent disclosures the company made in a small courtroom in Redwood City, California. According to reporting in the UK’s Guardian, Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company. But on Monday, the Guardian reports attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in speeches: Facebook, they repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the First Amendment. As the Guardian pointed out, questions about Facebook’s moral and legal responsibilities as a publisher have escalated surrounding its role in spreading false news and propaganda, along with questionable censorship decisions. The plaintiff, as the Guardian explained, is a former startup called Six4Three, first filed the suit in 2015 after Facebook removed app developers’ access to friends’ data. The company had built a controversial and ultimately failed app called Pikinis, which allowed people to filter photos to find ones with people in bikinis and other swimwear. Six4Three attorneys have alleged that Facebook enticed developers to create apps for its platform by…
Read the full story
by Eric Lieberman Facebook is planning on adapting to imminently enforced rules from the European Union by trying to exclude around 1.5 billion users from other places around the world. All users of the social media platform outside of the U.S. and Canada are subjected to the same rules, specifically those enacted and enforced by the company’s headquarters in Ireland, according to Reuters, which was the first to report on Facebook’s apparent intentions. Facebook wants to carve out the implementation of the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — a relatively stringent privacy law set to take effect May 25, 2018 that will govern internet and technology — to those in Europe. In other words, it wants to exempt itself from imposing the GDPR on the roughly 1.5 billion Facebook members in Australia, Asia, Africa and Latina America, since they are not confined by the same rules as the involved European countries. Some, of course, will view such a move as a way to elude liability for the way it handles user data, a huge point of contention that arose after a series of recent events and revelations. It could also be perceived as a way to ensure people outside the jurisdiction of the European…
Read the full story
Conservatives have complained for years about being censored by Facebook, but the Silicon Valley giant may have gone too far by blocking Diamond and Silk. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that his company had moved to correct what he described as an “enforcement error” after the popular social media duo said he shut down traffic to their page, which has 1.4 million followers.
Read the full story
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg appeared before US lawmakers Tuesday to apologize for how his company has handled the growing furor over online privacy, to promise change, and explain the social media giant’s policies. The wide-ranging questions — including about Cambridge Analytica, which used data scraped from 87 million Facebook users to target political ads ahead of the 2016 US election — put the 33-year-old billionaire under a microscope for several hours at a joint Senate committee hearing.
Read the full story
Before there was Facebook in America, there was Facesmash at Harvard and Mark Zuckerberg was behind both of them. There’s a lot more about this social media giant than most Americans likely never knew. So here are five basic facts about Zuckerberg and Facebook that put into a useful and historically accurate context everything he is likely to say and be asked about when he testifies this coming Wednesday before Congress.
Read the full story
by Jeffrey A. Rendall Mark Zuckerberg for president? If you’re like me, you consider the notion preposterous. Despite a barrage of worshipful media coverage in the past decade the Facebook co-founder still isn’t exactly a household name and there are no doubt tens of millions of Americans who either haven’t heard of the now 33 year-old gozillionaire Californian or don’t give a Mark Zuckerberghoot that he’s one of the richest human beings on the face of the earth. While it’s true Zuckerberg has at times weighed-in on certain political issues it’s not clear where he stands ideologically or what his real economic philosophies might be. For sure he’s a smart tech-savvy guy with a genius for marketing, but would he Make America Great Again? Zuckerberg’s no Donald Trump, in other words. Trump broke the mold in American politics being the first one to come in from outside the political system to seize control of the Republican Party’s presidential nomination and then beat the Democrat nominee in the Electoral College. Because Trump was able to pull-off the formerly unthinkable some are suggesting the two-party system could be in danger of extinction – or at least ripe for a major…
Read the full story
by George Rasley, ConservativeHQ.com Editor During a recent commencement speech at Harvard, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg came out in favor of a system in which all people receive a standard salary just for being alive, no questions asked. The system, known as universal basic income, is one of the trendiest economic theories of the past few years. Experiments in basic income have popped up in Kenya, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Oakland, California, among other places according to the Business Insider’s Chris Weller. “We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful,” Weller reported Zuckerberg told the crowd. “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.” And Zuckerberg is not alone. Tech executives like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Y Combinator President Sam Altman, and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes — who runs a basic-income fund called the Economic Security Project — have endorsed basic income. Many point to economic forecasts that say robots will displace much of the human workforce in the coming decades. A report from Oxford University in 2013,…
Read the full story