Writes Michelle Goldberg in the NYT, in
"Democrats Should Un-Friend Facebook/It’s time to treat Facebook like the ruthless monopoly it is."
The platform was an essential vector for Russian disinformation. It allowed the shady “psychographics” company Cambridge Analytica to harvest private user data. And Facebook helped decimate local newspapers, contributing to America’s widespread epistemological derangement. In general, people trust local papers more than the national media; when stories are about your immediate community, you can see they’re not fake news.....
So well before The Times’s blockbuster story on Wednesday about how Facebook deals with its critics, we knew it was a socially toxic force, a globe-bestriding company whose veneer of social progressivism hides amoral corporate ruthlessness. Still, it was staggering to learn that Facebook had hired a Republican opposition-research firm that sought to discredit some of the company’s detractors by linking them to George Soros — exploiting a classic anti-Semitic trope — while at the same time lobbying a Jewish group to paint the critics as anti-Semitic. Or that C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg, who has spent years cultivating an image as Facebook’s humane, feminist face, reportedly helped cover up the company’s internal findings about Russian activity on the site, lest they alienate Republican politicians.
Now we’re nearing something close to a progressive consensus: Facebook is bad. The question, as always, is what is to be done.... [T]here are plenty of Democrats who are ready to take on Facebook, and we can expect the new Congress to hold hearings about the exponentially expanding influence of the biggest tech platforms.... If Democrats can muster the will to regulate Facebook and other enormous tech companies, next comes the complicated question of how. Warner has laid out some intriguing ideas in a white paper. Among them are amending the Communications Decency Act to open platforms up to defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuits, mandating more transparency in the algorithms that decide what content we see, and giving consumers ownership rights over the data that platforms collect from them.
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113 comments:
Not my line but - I read somewhere that if Facebook was as powerful as people say, then a cute kitten would be president not Trump.
Without Facebook, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president, which is reason enough to curse its existence.
This is not intelligent commentary.
Where was the NY Times' concern about anti-Semitism when they pushed the latest Koch brothers conspiracy theory?
Message to NY Times: Hillary sucked, Facebook had nothing to do with it.
veneer of social progressivism hides amoral corporate ruthlessness
At its most purest core, social progressivism is filled with amoral corporate ruthlessness.
If social networks are supposed to filter out foreign activity from being presented to the US users and influencing US elections, then probably are also supposed to filter out foreign activity in other countries. E.g. political posts concerning foreign countries posted by US users should be filtered out and invisible in other countries.
Another aspect - what with posts by aliens ineligible to vote in US elections who are currently residing in the US and posting from within?
The whole enforcement of such rules sounds like incredible fun, and is also totally doable.
people trust local papers more than the national media
They're the same thing.
All politics aside, you can count me as someone who can’t stand Facebook. But to each their own.
The left has now become so left that it can't even tolerate the left.
It's pathetic to say that without Facebook, Trump probably wouldn't be President. Twitter is his thing, and he uses it very effectively. The left seems to have assumed that the owners of high tech would be their friends (generally true) and they would win any media wars (not necessarily true).
20th and 21st century technologies have provided vehicles for images and messages that used to be largely hidden to be open, transmitted widely and even globally. How much of the history of the movies is about violent crime, and then about women undressing and being assaulted in ways they don't like--things that would always have happened in private before? Porn drove the "home video" and VCR businesses, and if it didn't dominate DVDs, that's probably because it has always driven a lot of the internet. Then there is purely personal stuff with no particular political slant. I would think the political stuff of all kinds, bigoted, nasty or whatever, is a pretty small part of the total. Still, people like the "alt right" had virtually nowhere to go to be heard, and now they are online. They still sometimes see themselves as providing "balance" against the mainstream media, but the mainstream media is dying, and often becoming more shrill, stupid and dishonest.
Shorter NYT writer: No-one should be allowed to say anything negative about Hillary. Ever. Truth or not.
What Is To Be Done? was one of the principal Russian novels of the pre-revolutionary era.
The "woman question" was a dominant theme of the novel. Then as now, deconstructing sexual roles was a favored tactic of revolutionaries hoping to destroy human tradition in order to build the New Man and the New Woman. In Russia, this did not end well.
My local newspaper, The Kingston Freeman, is a Democratic Party propaganda rag. It uses stories from the AP for its state and national news. The AP is, for all purposes, a wing of the Democratic Party. I can see why Goldberg is dismayed by the Freeman's demise and the development of opposition media. The internet cut off the paper's ad revenue. It is now given away in local restaurants.
NYT Magazine celebrates Obama campaign's use of Facebook data.
What an amazing ROI those darned Russians got from the Facebook platform. Beto should have hired those guys. He’d be 96% wealthier and be headed to the Senate!
Why can't we just ban all speech and communications that are unfavorable to progressives?
We need a clever name for that speech which is unfavorable to progressives: I propose "hate speech".
Yes, it is a cliche, but the left are eating their own now.
Didn't the left harvest social media in a big way to give us Obama?
Is that OK. Esp since he hired corrupt Hillary to be his Secretary of State and Obama filled the DOJ and the FBI with corrupt hacks.
I said that and I am not even on facebook. Who is to blame for my wrong-think? Must find out and make it illegal.
[T]here are plenty of Democrats who are ready to take on Facebook, and we can expect the new Congress to hold hearings about the exponentially expanding influence of the biggest tech platforms.
I'm looking forward to the rude awakening the tech industries get when they find out the Democrats are going after them. I doubt it will stop with Facebook. More heretics will be found and punished.
Terry Resort said...
people trust local papers more than the national media
They're the same thing.
LOL, yes. My local paper in NJ was the same leftist rag that my local paper in NC is.
Oh yes, by all means Democrats, start hearings on Facebook. Do it! Do it!
And then there's this:
""The result of Facebook’s algorithmic changes: conservatives have been slammed. And that’s the point. A study from The Western Journal found that conservative sites have lost an average of 14 percent of their Facebook traffic; leftist sites saw a minor increase. Even major publications saw that effect: The New York Daily News saw a bump of 24.18 percent, while the New York Post dropped 11.44 percent."
If Hillary would have campaigned in WI and MI, she might have won.
Hillary is fat, stupid and lazy. Also a criminal.
Presumably if the NYT heard about a circle of girls souring the milk in Salem, they would be intrigued by the possibility of opening up the whole devilish community to lawsuits.
What if you had to argue...?
MadisonMan said...
"Oh yes, by all means Democrats, start hearings on Facebook. Do it! Do it!"
All that will happen is that Facebook's 'useful idiot' status will have expired...and so will Facebook.
I have a Russian emigre friend on FB who recently wrote about Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand. The Wikipedia summary of her life is quite interesting. A socialist, feminist heroine.
In the great and glorious tradition of revolution, she died at the age of 46 of cholera, a sewage borne disease.
The revolution succeeded in destroying even the most basic of infrastructure, sewage systems.
...and we can expect the new Congress to hold hearings about the exponentially expanding influence of the biggest tech platforms...
GOP still has the upper hand on the House. Meet our demands lefties or we won’t fund the government. Or the hundreds of investigations you have planned.
One thing I dislike about Facebook is the way it shoves politics in your face. I could honestly care less who all my aquaintinces that I barely know are voting for.
Clinton's wife and the DNC spent over a $billion. Somebody in Russia spent $100,000 on facebook ads. The NYT has some fantastic conclusions there. I notice the conclusion is prominate throughout the propaganda piece. Evidence? seems none existant.
On the Russia front, I see Mueller has filed another indictment that will never be tested in court. WikiLeaks. No news about what crime was committed. just an indictment.
And my last comment about FB, I really dislike how even if I don’t have an account, they still have access to, and can sell my data.
Anyone attacked in the NYT for being insufficiently dedicated to the advancement of Progressive politics can't be all bad.
I predict that once Trump leaves office there will never be another mention of "The Russians".
The solution is to treat online platforms like a newspaper or a phone company. Not this weird hybrid thing where they are responsible for censoring hate speech, but not slander. If twitter polices what is said on its platform -- even booting people because of things they are said to have done off-platform -- why can't they be sued for allowing its users to organize violent mobs or to bully people?
Does Goldberg really and truly believe Facebook tipped the scales for Trump? Far left liberals are mentally ill. Someone should call the white coats to pick them up. In Philly, they could re-open Byberry State Mental Hospital.
Russian disinformation
Except for the disinformation coming from Michelle Goldberg, Genuine American Disinformation is a lot better than Russian disinformation -
U! S! A!
> who recently wrote about Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand.
Curiously, Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was one of the few success stories of the Revolution, she did a good job with the Soviet schools. It wasn't her fault that the graduates had little opportunity to contribute after graduation.
Got it. Facebook is not helping progressive interests, therefore progressives are ready to destroy it.
They're always looking to do the right thing. In this case, they're probably accidentally right.
That "Hillary is a satan" facebook ad really turned the corner for me.
It wasn't her lifetime of shaming Bill's accusers, or her money grubbing schemes, or Benghazi failures and lies that led to the deaths, or even her private server used to hide all of her internal dealings that included mis-use of classified information and funneling international pay-to-play (like Russia) into her and Bill's private accounts. and then told "it's all yoga and Chelsea's wedding".
Goldberg, a mega Hillary supporter suffering from mega Hillary lost butthurt - wants to make Facebook 100% leftwing.
or she's leaving.
So anything that helped Trump was manipulated by Russia and should be shut down... that's their theory?
I could give two hoots for Facebook; have absolutely refused to have anything to do with it in the past, and I don't see that changing in the future.
OTOH I am inundated with fake news every time I open my local paper, the Los Angeles Times.
Does Goldberg really and truly believe Facebook tipped the scales for Trump?
Even though Fecebook favors liberals, it doesn't favor liberals as much as the MSM favors liberals, and, despite Fecebook's efforts, it also interferes with the MSM's self-appointed role as information gate-keepers.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, the left will not accept the election results. They endlessly angrily deny the fact, they lost, Trump won. The Democrats delusionally think that did not actually happen, that it was some sort of trick. Almost like the way we all know magicians fool us.
Power is never having your brand, (cough, cough, Google) mentioned.
Once again, Goldberg misses the obvious: it is not Facebook she doesn’t like, it is the internet. She doesn’t want people to hear and see things that she doesn’t approve.
Alex Trebek: "Shrill, stupid and dishonest."
Me: "Michelle Goldberg."
Short consult
Alex Trebek: "The judges accept your answer, though the answer was 'The New York Times Editorial Staff'.
Feminism is Marxism is communism, professor.
Your belief that there is a sane, good form of feminism is an absurd delusion.
Pre-revolutionary Russian literature is a 50 year long argument for the abolition of traditional sexual roles and religious observance.
Are you aware of how this ended?
Goldberg is your fellow Marxist feminist, Althouse.
The Progs want to de-platform any opposing points of view. Facebook is the biggest platform.
Progs want to control it, of course. What don't they want to control?
This is an extortion effort. It will be a coordinated one and this take will be echoed all over the media. If Zuckabug gives in to it he'll just get more of it. If he doesn't give in to it, he'll just get more of it.
Leftists narcissistically know they have superior ideas and those who oppose them are evil. So every election loss is due to gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, the unfair electoral college system, the unfair US Senate system 2 per state not by population, voter suppression and on and on and on. Accept when Democrats win, then any compliant are anti democratic and destroying our system..."appalling".
when stories are about your immediate community, you can see they’re not fake news.....
i guess we can call this a "wet streets cause rain" story...
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
— Michael Crichton
I had been optimistic that the Republicans would succeed in the 2018 midterm elections -- in particular, that they would keep their House majority -- because I felt sure that the Russians again would spend tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, as they had done in the 2016 elections. The Russians' Facebook ads had caused the Republicans' victory in the 2016 elections, and they would do so again in the 2018 elections.
Since the Republicans did not do as well as I expected, I have rethought my certainty that the Russians again would spend tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads to cause Republican victories.
I think that the Democrats have succeeded in inhibiting the Russians from spending so much on Facebook ads to cause Republican victories. It's likely that the Russians did spend thousands (but not tens of thousands of dollars, but these lesser expenditures did not suffice to cause Republican victories on the 2016 scale.
Blaming Facebook and The Russians is just the NYTimes saying to Trump's winning Campaign Strategy: "You didn't build that"
The name, professor, for people who believe that freedom of speech and democracy can somehow be preserved within a revolutionary Marxist state is "useful idiot."
If you're going to regulate, do it by designating them as common carriers who have to be content-neutral.
The question, as always, is what is to be done ... regulate Facebook ... amending the Communications Decency Act ... giving consumers ownership rights over ....
Is there a solution not involving greater Federal oversight and regulation?
How about teaching critical thinking, personal responsibility, and the wisdom of civility to our youths? Plenty of school hours could be made available by reducing the hours now spent on "progressive" indoctrination.
Facebook is and always has been a platform devoted to making a permanent public record of everyman's every intemperate thought and private personal detail.
The popularity of Facebook among Progressives reveals the low level of critical thinking, personal responsibility, and civility characteristic of that cohort.
The day of the midterm elections arrived, but I still had not seen any Facebook ads showing Jesus arm-wrestling Nancy Pelosi.
When I realized that the Russians had not bought those Jesus ads on Facebook for the 2018 mid-term elections, my heart sank.
That is when I began to despair that the Republicans might not keep their majority in the House.
The NYT is accusing Facebook of being a major propagandists tool that they do not control. That is a Crime. All Propaganda Belongs Us. It is a war.
This is like watching European leaders in August of 1914. There is a true derangement erupting in Globalist Land. The Trump has driven them into mental breakdown.
If you are going to run a secret bribery scheme on a private server, keep it secret. Don't mix your other business and government business with it. And be sure it is absolutely secure.
Hillary's a fucking idiot. There is no other way to describe her. She is too stupid to be POTUS.
What would Don Corlene do?
Shorter Goldberg: "Censorship and rule by totalitarian virtue-crats is all fun and games until the fake news and free-speech suppression isn't coming from *our* side."
I'd enjoy seeing some hot prog-on-prog monopoly v. anti-trust action, but, as this article makes obvious, that some tech giants are monopolies run by authoritarian ideological fanatics isn't really what bothers people like Goldberg about some tech giants.
Comanche Voter said...
I could give two hoots for Facebook; have absolutely refused to have anything to do with it in the past, and I don't see that changing in the future.
This is a common sentiment among conservatives. It's the old 'I don't care what John Stewart said. I don't watch the Daily show.'
This somewhat solipsistic attitude is why we have a booming economy and leftist commies are getting elected left and right.
YOU may not use facebook (neither do I), but millions and millions of young, impressionable, enthusiastic people do.
Freedom of speech. If our new internet masters aren't going to allow an open un-censored forum in their realms then they should be held legally responsible for everything published.
Lewis Wetzel:
This is not intelligent commentary.
You could know that by just reading the byline, without having to read the article.
From #orangemanbad to #facebookisbad. That didn't take long.
Warren buffet owns 67 or so local papers.
Remember that each time you read a story in one.
He does not exercise any direct editorial control over them.
He doesn't need to. They know what he likes and doesn't like.
John Henry
Election lying, cheating and stealing will only be addressed when it hurts the left.
What they don't like is us all talking to each other. Esp all those commenters - you don't know who they are!
Let us curate your information for you.
"This is not intelligent commentary.
You could know that by just reading the byline, without having to read the article.
You could know that by just reading The New York Times at the top of the page.
Goldberg is an idiot, too. I sense a pattern.
Yes, Facebook ran a handful of amateurish ads that swung the election.
Believe that with all your heart.
By using Facebook you agree to let them do anything they like with your Facebook stuff.
Bear that in mind when you see that cute picture of your kids show up in an ad for Rice Crispies or such.
YOU AGREED TO LET THEM DO IT.
It's nobody's fault but your own.
What most people don't realize is that they have also givenFB the right to use anything they may find rummaging around in your hard drive, even if you have not shared it on FB.
Using FB, unless you have a dedicated machine just for that, is about the dumbest thing anyone can do cyberwise.
John Henry
Is there a solution not involving greater Federal oversight and regulation?
No. Not to any problem. We had the solution before the problem existed.
I'm not even 100% sure a dedicated machine is enough
John Henry
Haha. It's a shame they can't both lose.
Uh oh. Time for a re-branding. Bring back the "The," Mark.
Michelle Goldberg has morphed into Minister Mason of Snowpiercer that she would be happy to eradicate the proles who don't vote for her candidates.
Seriously, it's easy to imagine her saying: "Approximately, 47% of you shall die," from a loudspeaker. She seems the type.
johnhenry100
Warren owns the Omaha World-Herald. At the last ASM, Warren and Charlie said they were surprised at how rapid the decline has been.
The OWH sacked the top guy and lots of others. The news staff unionized. The top person was brought in from Iowa.
But for the coverage of Creighton and Nebraska sports, the OWH would be dead. It has really gone down hill in the last 3 months.
Here's the analogy. Trump would NEVER buy any real estate without title insurance.
Idiot Hillary had no insurance when she ran her bribery scheme on a server that a 10 year old Iranian kid could hack.
She's a fucking idiot. Why don't more people just come out and say it?
I only hope I live long enough to read her deleted emails. Her lawyers kept a copy. And all of our enemies have them.
If they follow through on this advice I'm going to have to rejoin Facebook so that I can help ensure a Trump victory in 2020.
Considering the money the Clintons pulled in, they should have been paying $100k per year on computer security. But since they were used to the government paying for everything, they went cheap. Idiots.
Did Facebook televise debates? Did Facebook build arenas for Trump to hold rallies in? What did I miss?
I blame Amazon. If it wasn't for Amazon Trump supporters would have run out of red hats.
... If Democrats can muster the will to regulate Facebook and other enormous tech companies
Remember when it was Microsoft that needed regulating? Missed opportunity. If the government had just regulated Microsoft the way they regulated AT&T, they could have stopped this Internet thing from ever happening.
The great irony here
Is that conservatives hate them too
FB hires liberals to derate news favorable to conservatives.
Liberals hate them because Donald Trump exists
If the entire world was different,
under their control
then their cognitive dissonance would be eliminated.
"Why can't you people see this?"
Since everyone, left and right, hates facebook,
Can FB shrink at an exponential rate?
will we see a
"reverse network effect"?
johnhenry100 said...
I'm not even 100% sure a dedicated machine is enough
John Henry
11/16/18, 8:24 AM
From what I understand FB can still access your data even if you’ve never had an account with them.
Best recent story was Zuck firing creator of Oculus
because he gave $10K to an anti-Hillary group.
That tells you where Silly Valley is going.
Brad Parscale praises facebook and their analytics in his 60 minutes interview last February. They provided people directly for the campaign. (Parscale even says Hillary was offered the same support but turned it down).
That being said, It wasn't Facebook that was the key. It was the micro-targeting of thousands of A/B test advertisements. The Ad Ann would get would be different than the Ad I would get, even down to font choices and coloring. Those that got likes, views, clicks, bubbled to the top.
This method isn't a "facebook" thing. It's a social media thing. It's a network effect. The left can destroy Facebook and it won't matter. It's the methodology, not the platform. Social media advertising is cheap, and targeted.
Destroying Facebook is like destroying Fox News in an attempt to stop conservatism. It won't matter. Another network (OAN?) would pop up.
One thing I've noticed is that Facebook is MUCH less political than it was in 2016. Whatever algorithm changes they made seems to have tamped down the rhetoric. If you use facebook in any capacity on a weekly basis you can just "feel" when they have changed their algorithm. They definitely did something after 2016.
The left has to figure out a way to appeal to the middle with a positive message, and not just assume they are easily duped by Russian bots.
I love Progressive autophagy. May I have some more, please? And please add a large dollop of Occluded Cortex, thank you.
Funny how the Diebold machines weren't cheating in 2006 and 2008, ita almost as it was an excuse,
If the left wins an election then everything is fine stop counting and don't ask questions.
It is pretty obvious to anyone outside of the left-wing bubble that Facebook management tried to help Hillary.
The problem is that the left, living in a bubble as they do, post utterly deranged propaganda from leftist organizations. And normal people see it and are shook by how deranged their "friends" have become. The reaction is that leftists cocoon and think everybody is thinking the same way while in fact, they are alienating the middle.
Right wing types do the same thing, but do not have anything like the reach to penetrate into leftist oblasts. So it largely works in one way only.
Ignored in the bit about Cambridge Analytical's purchase of data from Facebook is that Facebook gave Obama's minions a free hand to data mine the entire website's customer base to their hearts' content, for FREE. That would be every bit of all US user data, every bit of all international user data, every bit of searchable data on the site in aggregate or in detail.
Odd that is not mentioned. Must not fit the new narrative of "Facebook BAD."
I thought you Deplors hated FB too because of equal but opposite reasons?
Hillary's campaign spent almost twice as much as Trump's for the 2016 election.
If these figures had been reversed, the NYT et al would be in full jihad mode to regulate money in politics. But since it was the other way around, they have nothing to say about the role of money in this election. It's as if the NYT used to try to hide its political biases, but now it proudly promotes them.
As for "It's Facebook's fault," the best model to explain progessives explanations for "How could this have happened?" remains Kubler-Ross. The author is apparently still stuck in Denial: Trump couldn't have won (yet it seems he did) therefore some villain must have stolen the election for him, so, really, he didn't actually win after all.
In this mindscape there's anger aplenty, yet Bargaining isn't morally acceptable, and Acceptance remains far beyond the most distant horizon.
If it's Facebook's fault, then Hillary is entitled to run again. This would give some of our commenters another opportunity to swear they voted for Jill Stein.
People who claim Facebook effected Trump's election because--"RUSSIA!"--paint a big red label on their forehead: FOOL.
Last year, I got a cold call from a Financial Advisor wanting me to hire his services. I asked to name one stock he would recommend. His answer was Facebook. I told him I didn't need his bad advice. He asked why, and I told him that Facebook was making a lot of moves the would result in massive backlash.
Today, conservatives don't trust it because FB is known to censor them. Now progressives are doing their normal shakedown of a large corporation because greed and money are what progressives do. Show progressives a big pocket of money, and they will stick their hands in it every time.
David Brooks thinks there is no point to being a conservative. Here is one. Say no to trying to control and censor Facebook. Say no to the government appointed arbiter of speech. Break it up under antitrust and let the market operate.
"...they have nothing to say about the role of money in this election..."
Oh but they do. Money from the right is dark (ooooh, scary) money from fat-cat capitalists. Money from the left (see Beto and his $38 million) is pennies and nickles lovingly shared by innocent patriots.
"Considering the money the Clintons pulled in, they should have been paying $100k per year on computer security. But since they were used to the government paying for everything, they went cheap. Idiots."
Of course they are cheap. These are the people who took tax deductions for donating their old worn underwear to charity. Interestingly though, while Iranian teenagers could hack her illegal private server, it looks like the NSA could not. Or somehow didn't.
Kay,
Yes. FB can access data that might be in various nooks and crannies of cyberspace.
Even if one has never been on fb
What I am talking about is info on your hard drive that has never been put in cyberspace. My accounting program and records. Pictures that I keep on my computer NEVER in flicker, picasa or the like. Client drawings.
It is why I do not permit anyone (kids, grandkids) to access fb on any of my machines. Not even with the locked down guest account I have so they can surf etc.
John Henry
Yes, totally.
Perfect Goldbergian liberal vacuity: "... regulate Facebook and other enormous tech companies, next comes the complicated question of how."
Maybe thinking about "How" should come before you decide to plunge headlong into meddling with a huge economic sector? Nah.
The left turning on Facebook. Bummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmer, man.
If Romney had won in 2012, then Trump wouldn't be president.
If illegal immigration wasn't tolerated, then Trump wouldn't be president.
If the US didn't sign bad trade deals, then Trump wouldn't be president.
If the media didn't reflexively frame criticism of black politicians as racism, then Trump wouldn't be president.
If Hillary didn't run in 2016, then Trump wouldn't be president.
See how this goes?
Facebook presented how obnoxious Democrats and democrats are. I never saw any Russian ads, to my knowledge - I ignore ads - it was simply the behavior presented by democrat friends (sic) showing democrat behavior, and saying they were good things, which included violence, lying, vandalism and theft.
Excerpt I noted from article.
"The question, as always, is: what is to be done.... there are plenty of Democrats who are ready to .... "
The "as always" is - to me - the tell. She's not even hiding it anymore. I cannot believe that anyone who writes for a living in 2018 doesn't think of the association of that particular string of words from the last century. Or would you argue that she is that uninformed?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done
According to wiki: it was a milestone in the split between the bolsheviks and the mensheviks.
Infighting between cadres of people who see themselves as the vanguard elite who should control things.
Some might say History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I say it takes wilful actors to keep trying to put on the same play, thinking this time it will be different.
Interesting how all the libs now pick on FB, which I detest for other reasons, but nary a peep about twitter, which was and remain's Trump's favorite communications tool.
Just a bunch of herd animals, methinks.
My experience as an advertiser on Facebook is the company very open and democratic. Anyone can create an ad and post it with little or no hassle. If you have a problem, finding a human is relatively easy.
Google, on the other hand, is opaque, tyrannical, and unaccountable. Try talking to a person about any problem you have. Good luck. You get a form letter if you are lucky.
I'm very skeptical of the anti-Facebook message. It sounds to me like big advertisers trying to shut down the competition. Also, taking away an alternative to Google is a bad idea. Google is so much worse.
"The problem with the internet is that there are no gatekeepers!" - HRC complaining that the truth about her husband saw the light of day. Liberals and leftists have been working on the problem ever since.
Obama campaign using FB data = Genius
Trump campaign using FB data = FB must die
Facebook is Emmanuel Goldstein on the front page of the NYTimes online today. Michelle Goldberg's column is only one of seven different hit-pieces against Facebook in both the "News" and "Opinion" sections. Even the photographs of Zuckerberg and Sandberg appear to have been chosen for their sinister lighting.
I don't buy it. Beyond this theory charging down the "voters vote based on ads" nonsense, Facebook content overall was actually quite antagonistic toward Trump.
My biggest problem with Facebook and Twitter is that the cost of entry and exit are so low, kicking the assholes out has little deterrent effect. In the meantime, this minority can really disrupt, if not destroy, a group.
Anything that damages Facebook is OK with me.
Its evil
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