September 28, 2017

"After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea."

"Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election. We will continue to work to build a community for all people. We will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections. We'll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy."

Writes Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, receiving and defending against and proving the effectiveness of the hit he took from Donald Trump yesterday. Zuckerberg doesn't link to or embed the tweet. It was this:

Whether Facebook was really anti-Trump or not, it was useful to Trump to push it back in Twitterish simplicity because he has so many powerful antagonists who are leaning on Facebook to sacrifice whatever ideals of neutrality and freedom of speech that it may have. I hope Facebook solidifies, preserves, and extends its neutrality and freedom values, and with that end in mind, I appreciate what I think is the effectiveness of Trump's absurdly abrupt tweet.

The question "Collusion?" is very funny, because "collusion" is a key word in the muck of charges about the Russian influence on the campaign. A free-wheeling "collusion" suspicion works as a satire of the Russia-related collusion talk. And it makes us wonder, what's so bad about collusion? Are these different sets of people not supposed to act in pursuit of the same goal, not supposed to talk with each other at all, not supposed to notice what each other is doing and figure out how to do things that coordinate?

37 comments:

Sebastian said...

"defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections."

First maybe-not-fake-news on Russian FB ad spending, all $100K of it: went to Stein and Bernie. Which swung the vote against Hill and "subverted" the elections, right? Who knew lefties were so gullible, so easily swayed?

So the essence of the lefty complaint about Russian collusion is that outsiders should stop making them vote left.

rehajm said...

If you believe the when-both-sides-hate-you metric then he’s doing just fine. You’re clear to be dismissive of Hillary’s rants from now on though.

paminwi said...

"Collusion"! Something that isn't even against the law except in some kind of financial transactions.

Ken B said...

You see the irony in "collusion?" I expect to barraged by allegations he's a conspiracy theorist.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Now the media are blaming Russia for Ferguson.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

Zuckerberg was right. It is crazy to think $100,000 in FB, shit stirring, ads had any impact on the election.

So to answer the Althouse's -- no. Zuckerberg will not defend freedom at FB.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

I also notice only Trump and conservatives are using the phrase "fake news."

He really won that round. But he had a big assist from all the mainstream press stories that were fake news.

M Jordan said...

Most of the outrage directed at Trump's commentary have been the result of missing the humor. When Trump looked at the camera and asked Russia to help find Hillary's email, all Trump supporters laughed out loud. When he led the "Build the wall" chants at rallies, we smiled and shouted a little louder, a little more ridiculously. And when Trump said "Get that son of a bitch off the field," we roared with laughter.

Yet the scowling neo-Puritans, AKA the Left, stiffened their forefingers and began a nationwide wag.

Selena Zito, who should have won last year's Pulitzer instead of that insufferable gasbag Peggy Noonan, crystallized the disconnect when she wrote, "Trump's supporters take him seriously but not literally, his oppononents take him literally but not seriously."

Big Mike said...

There is no question that the Times and the Post collude, certainly at least informally and quite possibly formally via something akin to Journolist. They push the same stories using the same talking points, and carefully bury the same stories if deemed too favorable to Republicans in general or Trump in particular, or which make Democrats look bad.

@Althouse, do you remember when that schmuck Ezra Klein accused you of running an anti-Semitic blog because one of your commentators (that'd be me) noted how rapidly the same writers converged on the same storylines and asked, jokingly, whether their rabbis ran a phone tree. Then it turned out that Klein himself ran, not a phone tree but a chat room, where a select group of young alleged journalists really did reach quick consensus about which stories to push, which to bury, which points to make, etc.

tim in vermont said...

Wikileaks clearly shows collusion between the press and Hillary. Who can argue?

Fernandinande said...

$100,000 = 0.00004 of total campaign spending (about $2.3 billion)

Michael K said...

Facebook is by no means "neutral."

I was warned of possible banning a couple of years ago when I posted that "Muslims don't make good immigrants."

They must have some sort of screening as I doubt many are reading my comments.

Two weeks ago, I was banned for 24 hours for linking to an article that a member of ANTIFI arrested in Spain at a riot is an American transexual.

They must have a SJW developed screen. I see the most obscene and disgusting comments about Trump having sex with his daughter, etc, all the time.

tim in vermont said...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/19/donald-trump-facebook-election-manipulate-behavior

Chuck said...

Althouse: "I hope Facebook solidifies, preserves, and extends its neutrality and freedom values, and with that end in mind, I appreciate what I think is the effectiveness of Trump's absurdly abrupt tweet."

I don't hope for that at all. I hope that Facebook, and all of their millennial lefty content managers and their millennial lefty chairman and CEO, are substantially diminished. I hope that people wake up to all of the data that they are volunteering for free to Facebook and resent it.

I don't want Facebook to be making any substantial determinations of "neutrality and freedom" in the realm of public discourse. Facebook isn't qualified to do that and never will be. Facebook is a nasty private mosh-pit.

I will say to Professor Althouse; the most recent episode of the public radio program "On the Media" entitled "Trust Issues" is aimed at this notion (among other closely related issues) and I am confident that she will find it to be a worthwhile 52-minute listen.

"On the Media" is a devoutly left-leaning public radio program and the "Trust Issues" episode is no exception. However, the redeeming thing is that in this case, the episode was transparent in its bias, and the issues raised are so wonderfully complex that they defied ideology.

Does Facebook need more fairness regulation by the government? If so, isn't that exactly what the Russian government is doing? That is, regulating media content to conform to a government's vision of "fairness"? And so what if Facebook claims that it isn't a media company at all? Facebook walks the line of being a media company on one hand (they surely are), and on the other hand being a mere technology platform where users decide the content.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-09-22

Anonymous said...

I hope Facebook solidifies, preserves, and extends its neutrality and freedom values...

Non-existent things cannot be solidified or preserved.

narciso said...

So how long have the Russians been promoting some lives matters,

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

Agree with Chuck and Angel-Dyne here. Zuckerberg can say whatever he likes about freedom blah blah ~ which I believe he is halfhearted at best in doing ~ but the bottom line is that there is an army of millennial lefties doing the actual implementation of content control. Remember when they were caught manipulating the 'trending now' news section? Same song, different verse.

roesch/voltaire said...

Given that one out of three Americans don't know what is in the Bill of Rights or who their congress folks are I am not surprised that Russian Bots posting ads and starting fake accounts social media disrupted our democratic process and helped influence our elections. As far as I am concerned real people who use their names can post all the BS they want, but the issue involves insuring that is the case.

mockturtle said...

"We will continue to work to build a community for all people. We will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections. We'll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy."

Delusions of grandeur, perhaps?

rcocean said...

Of course Facebook is anti-Trump. So is Twitter. Look at their news Feeds. Twitter's "Moments" page look like Bernie Sanders writes it.

Does any remember that during the campaign twitter REFUSED to sell the Trump campaign ad time?

BTW, I despise Zuckerprick. Its astounding that someone so Anti-American and greedy should have such control over the Facebook Zombies.

Ray - SoCal said...

Facebook is run by the cultural elite of the us, and reflects their biases.

Chuck and Michael K were on target.

Hidden algorithms based on the cultural left beliefs governs what you are shown. Same thing happens on twitter and Google.

Too bad gab self immolated. Great case study on freedom of speech...

mccullough said...

Are the Russians behind Take a Knee? They've been funding and instigating Fifth Columnists since the 20s.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

The question "Collusion?" is very funny, because "collusion" is a key word in the muck of charges about the Russian influence on the campaign. A free-wheeling "collusion" suspicion works as a satire of the Russia-related collusion talk. And it makes us wonder, what's so bad about collusion? Are these different sets of people not supposed to act in pursuit of the same goal, not supposed to talk with each other at all, not supposed to notice what each other is doing and figure out how to do things that coordinate?

Two points:
1.) I'm not sure it's accurate to say that "collusion" is they key word anymore, Professor--the Media & Left seem to have dropped that lately; having failed to demonstrate any actual collusion at all they now just say "connections" between some people around Trump and some Russian people. Of course they say "troubling connections" or "connections that raise concerns" or whatever, but they seem to have realized that even their vague accusations and insinuations can't support "collusion." Which, you know, is pretty telling, I think.

2.) You are correct to highlight (however obliquely) what lots of us on the Right jump up and down shouting all the time: there are few better examples of "collusion" between powerful groups than between Dems and the Media. Not only are tons of Media big wigs hardcore Lefties themselves; not only are lots of very powerful Media figures related to Dem politicians; not only do rank-and-file Media workers skew strongly Left (and donate to Dems, etc); but also the Media so frequently coordinates their output with Democrat political efforts (by framing issues in Dem-friendly ways, relying on Dem-backed "independent" think tanks for data, giving softball questions to Dems but grilling Repubs, etc) that Professor Reynolds' assertion that one should consider the Media as Democrats with bylines is depressingly accurate most of the time.
Democrat-supporting Media organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars giving biased "coverage" of news and political questions each year. Charges that some non-Democrat coordinated in some minor way with some other organization or institution and that the meager output of that alleged coordination made any kind of difference in the otherwise "fair" media environment is laughable. Ridiculous.

Chuck said...

Ray said...
...

Too bad gab self immolated. Great case study on freedom of speech...


Ray; if your reference with "gab" is to the social media site Gab.ai, the link I posted above to the public radio program "On the Media" contains an interview of Gab's COO, and I'll bet that you'd find it interesting.

traditionalguy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
traditionalguy said...

I suspect the CIA shadow government has put the hammer down on Trump and his entourage about any alliance with Russia being strictly an act of war on the shadow government that will do what Schumer mentioned they do without hesitation.

The Stalinist USSR was such a deadly enemy to NATO for so long, that Russia today bears that guilt and apparently must payoff the establishment politicians to get fair treatment.

DJT"s blithely offering to negotiate a free peace for Putin's Russia is seen as the Protestants were seen when they offered their free grace Sola Fides doctrine to Catholic peasants in the 1500s. In both cases, the shadow government first threatens you to stop doing it and renounce your Herersy, or then they will convict you of a fake charge and kill you.

buwaya said...

I have been saying this for years -

In the case of the MSM, it is not a matter of collusion, or happenstance that ideologies of the industry professionals match the interests of their owners, or that there are ad-hoc back channels between media entities or between these and Democrat operatives.

The mass of this, and its precision of coordination, adds up to my conclusion that its just too much to think that all this happens or happened organically. Its not happenstance, its not ad-hoc.

This is an organized, centrally coordinated system.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

roesch/voltaire said...
Given that one out of three Americans don't know what is in the Bill of Rights or who their congress folks are I am not surprised that Russian Bots posting ads and starting fake accounts social media disrupted our democratic process and helped influence our elections.


That's called begging the question, roesch/Voltaire.

mockturtle said...

This is an organized, centrally coordinated system.

My younger daughter says it's the Illuminati. ;-)

Ray - SoCal said...

Chuck, yes it's Gab.ai

Gab has a huge issue with moderation from what I have read. Disclaimer - I am not a lawyer! It would be great to have a lawyer give a knowledgeable opinion on this. My take:

There is protected speech, and some speech such as defamatory is not protected in the US. Gab.ai from what I have read, is not set up to handle this issue. They regard all speech as allowed. And if you have issues, you can complain to their registrar. Registrars don't want to deal with this, and the future does not look good from what I have read. Their HQ is in the US, but they were using a domain registrar in Australia (that opens up more issues with what speech is allowed).

My only knowledge has been following it through postings such as this:

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/09/gab-kicked-off-registrar.html

https://steemit.com/technology/@cheah/the-current-state-of-alt-tech


Gab's key weakness is its inability or unwillingness to moderate posts. While it is unwaveringly committed to free speech, freedom is not and cannot be unlimited. As the old adage goes, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Harmful speech -- speech that incites violence or compromises the privacy and safety of individuals -- is not protected speech. Gab must be able to moderate harmful content to preserve the continued health and safety of its users, and it has failed the test....


http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/09/legal-legion-update.html

A suite has been filed in Travis County on the issue of defamation. Link to the court web page - I could not figure out how to find the petition.
https://www.traviscountytx.gov/courts/civil

Common blunder per The Princess Bride is " "never get involved in a land war in Asia" One for the Internet - never start a fight with Vox Day. He is the author of SJW Always Lie, that can be bought through the Althouse Amazon Portal for $5.99.

Michael K said...

The mass of this, and its precision of coordination, adds up to my conclusion that its just too much to think that all this happens or happened organically. Its not happenstance, its not ad-hoc.

Oh, I think it began as a shared interest in big government. The Administrative State was largely begun by Wilson and grew astronomically under Roosevelt. Eisenhower did not enlarge it and Kennedy had little effect except the EO about federal employee unions.

Johnson added huge layers of bureaucracy and that is where it began to really gain power. For example, the OEO was begun as an office to combat racism in employment but Johnson added all sorts of victim groups that involved it in everything.

Nixon appointed Rumsfeld to head it and Rumsfeld protested that he had voted against it as a Congressman. Nixon said,"That's why I gave it to you. If you see something worthwhile fund it."

But Nixon let a lot of leftists run his domestic policy shop, like Moynihan and Finch.

When the Democrats and the FBI got Nixon ousted after a 49 state landslide, there was no limit to what the Administrative State could do.

Reagan was also consumed, like Nixon, with foreign policy although he did get the tax cut through by letting the Democrats control spending.

The Bushes were slightly to the right of Democrats. Clinton and Obama cemented the Deep State in power.

It will take dynamite to get them out. I don't know if Trump can do it.

It may take the coming financial collapse to do it.

Yancey Ward said...

"As far as I am concerned real people who use their names can post all the BS they want, but the issue involves insuring that is the case."

Step right up and tell us who you are.

Darrell said...

So to make it perfectly clear to those that don't keep up, that Facebbook/Russia stuff that the Lefties here have been pushing for the last couple of months turned out to be a gigantic nothing burger. The "Russians" didn't buy Facebook ads promoting Trump, they bought Facebbook ads promoting BLM and the Ferguson and Baltimore protests/riots. Who did they "target" with targeted ads? Lefties. Who else supported BLM and the protests/riots? George Soros and the Democrats. So it seems that "Russia" was supporting the Democrats with the ad purchases. Not a single Trump-favorable ad was purchased. This whole thing was another lie from the Democrats/MSM.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Ray; if your reference with "gab" is to the social media site Gab.ai, the link I posted above to the public radio program "On the Media" contains an interview of Gab's COO, and I'll bet that you'd find it interesting.

An NPR interview?

[I'm kidding, I'm kidding, we're all having fun, just kidding around.]

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Darrell said...So to make it perfectly clear to those that don't keep up, that Facebbook/Russia stuff that the Lefties here have been pushing for the last couple of months turned out to be a gigantic nothing burger. The "Russians" didn't buy Facebook ads promoting Trump, they bought Facebbook ads promoting BLM and the Ferguson and Baltimore protests/riots. Who did they "target" with targeted ads? Lefties.

I think it's probably more accurate to say the ads we have seen evidence of so far do not appear to have been designed to exclusively benefit any one candidate. Some may have had the effect of helping Trump, but some may have had the effect of helping Clinton--some may have had the effect of helping neither and/or suppressing voter turn out!
That may seem like a pedantic correction but it's important to your larger point: that the assertion that this is "clear evidence of Russia's attempt to help Trump get elected" and/or "evidence of likely Russian collusion w/the Trump campaign" is clearly incorrect.

You can tell the smart Lefties understand that now, too. The NPR report this morning (about Facebook or Twitter people testifying to a Cong. committee today, I think) described the targeted ads as issue ads (or something like that) and then ended the segment by saying they were thought to be part of "what several US intelligence agencies have described as Russia's attempt to help get Donald Trump get elected." [my paraphrase but I think I have the important part correct]
See the shift? They know THIS isn't evidence of Russia helping Trump but this is something Russia did and since more than one agency declared that Russia wanted to help Trump win...
It's sloppy argument-by-unsupported-insinuation, but that's what propoganda's often made from...and the Media (NPR included!) is Lefty propaganda. Clearly.

JaimeRoberto said...

I'd still like to see these ads that were so persuasive that they did with a $100K ad buy what Hillary couldn't do with her $1B.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Big Mike: @Althouse, do you remember when that schmuck Ezra Klein accused you of running an anti-Semitic blog because one of your commentators (that'd be me) noted how rapidly the same writers converged on the same storylines and asked, jokingly, whether their rabbis ran a phone tree.

Where would Klein have got that idea? Their rabbis? Oh wait, aren't you the one going who was just going on about the goyim?

Yeah BM. Just get rid of us and Paradise awaits.

Until you figure out it was those damned Irish all along...