Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

Commentary: The Dawn Of Corporate Totalitarianism

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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…

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Facebook ‘Unintentionally’ Uploaded Email Contacts of 1.5 Million Users

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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…

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US Housing Department Charges Facebook With Housing Discrimination

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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…

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Facebook CEO Details Company Battle with Hate Speech

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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…

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Facebook Accused Of Massively Inflating Video Viewership and the Impact on Newsrooms Was Devastating

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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.…

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Supports Left Wing Democrats Like Fellow Harvard-Educated New Yorker Phil Bredesen

Anthony Accardi
Phil Bredesen, Mark Zuckerberg

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…

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How Censorship by Facebook Reinforces This Writer’s Point on Liberals’ Intolerance

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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…

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Commentary: Time To Make Facebook Pay For Its Lies

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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…

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Facebook Wants To Exclude 1.5 Billion Users From Privacy Rules It Seems To Consider Overbearing

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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…

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Marsha Blackburn Takes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Task for Censoring ‘Diamond and Silk’

Tennessee Star Staff

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.

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‘My Mistake’: Key Zuckerberg Quotes in Senate Facebook Grilling

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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.

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Five Key Facts You Should Know About Mark Zuckerberg’s 12-Year Facebook Apology Tour

Tennessee Star Staff

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.

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Commentary: Does Anyone Really Think Mark Zuckerberg Could Challenge Trump in 2020?

Tennessee Star Staff

  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…

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Commentary: Mark Zuckerberg’s Communist Manifesto

Tennessee Star Staff

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,…

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