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Worthless Media
WELCOME TO WORTHLESS MEDIA WHERE THE FAILURE OF REAL JOURNALISM IS
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the white-wing media
dec 5, 2019
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: politicus usa, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
*Tucker Carlson Putin does not hate America like liberal pundits do, says Fox News host
*Fox & Friends hosts whine about Trump supporters being called a ‘cult’ after they scream obscenities at latest rally
*GOP strategist smacked down on CNN for refusing to believe impeachment support is at 50 percent
Facebook
Revealed: Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib targeted in far-right fake news operation
Israeli-based group uses Facebook to spread disinformation to more than a million followers around the world, singling out Muslim US congresswomen
David Smith, Michael McGowan , Christopher Knaus and Nick Evershed
the guardian
Thu 5 Dec 2019 09.00 EST
Two Muslim US congresswomen have been targeted by a vast international operation that exploits far-right pages on Facebook to inflame Islamophobia for profit, a Guardian investigation has found.
A mysterious Israeli-based group uses 21 Facebook pages to churn out more than a thousand coordinated fake news posts per week to more than a million followers around the world. It milks the traffic for revenue from digital advertising.
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who earlier this year became the first Muslim women to serve in the US Congress, have been singled out for vicious attacks by the coordinated effort.
Somali-born Omar is the most frequent target. She has been mentioned in more than 1,400 posts since the network began two years ago. Tlaib has been mentioned nearly 1,200 times. Both totals are far higher than any other member of Congress.
Omar and Tlaib are members of a group of progressive women of color known as “the squad” that also includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. They have been subject to racist insults from Donald Trump.
The Guardian uncovered contacts between a group of mysterious Israel-based accounts and 21 far-right Facebook pages across the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, Austria, Israel and Nigeria.
The posts exacerbate Islamophobia by amplifying far-right parties and vilifying Muslim and leftwing politicians. Their content is a blend of distorted news and pure fabrication.
An analysis by Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre indicated a single entity is coordinating the publication of content across the Facebook pages.
Using web archiving services and domain registry information, the Guardian has been able to confirm a key figure in the network is Ariel Elkaras, a thirtysomething jewelry salesman and online operator living on the outskirts of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
Several of the network’s websites were either taken down or had large amounts of content removed soon after the Guardian approached Elkaras for comment. Public posts on his Facebook profile were also deleted.
Elkaras did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and phone, but the Guardian was able to track him down in the Israeli town of Lod, near Tel Aviv, where he denied involvement in the network. “It’s nothing related to me,” he said through a translator.
The uncovering of the network is likely to fuel concerns that Facebook is failing to tackle disinformation and hate groups ahead of next year’s presidential election in the US.
Abbas Barzegar, director of research and advocacy at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: “Spreading disinformation and faux-reporting through pre-networked social media accounts and pseudo-news websites has been the preferred tactic of the Islamophobia industry for a very long time.
“These actors create entire media and information ecosystems that inscribe dangerous ideas and narratives in audiences across the world. The impact isn’t personal prejudice, alone. Rather, such disinformation impacts our political climate, actual laws, policies and overall culture.”
Somali-born Omar, the first member of the House of Representatives to wear a hijab in the chamber, has been subject to hundreds of online death threats. In September she accused Trump of putting her life at risk after the president retweeted a post that falsely claimed she partied on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Omar told the Guardian: “As this report makes clear, foreign interference – whether by individuals or governments – is still a grave threat to our democracy. These are malicious actors operating in a foreign country, Israel, spreading misinformation and hate speech to influence elections in the United States. The goal of these anti-Muslim hate campaigns is clear – they put Muslim lives here and around the world at risk and undermine our country’s commitment to religious pluralism.”
She also slammed Facebook for its role in allowing users to spread misinformation.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Facebook’s complacency is a threat to our democracy. It has become clear that they do not take seriously the degree to which they provide a platform for white nationalist hate and dangerous misinformation in this country and around the world. And there is a clear reason for this: they profit off it. I believe their inaction is a grave threat to people’s lives, to our democracy and to democracy around the world.
“When private corporations don’t act, we as a nation need to think seriously about ways to address the spread of misinformation while protecting core values like free speech.”
When the Guardian notified Facebook of its investigation, the company removed several pages and accounts “that appeared to be financially motivated”, a spokesperson said in a statement.
“These pages and accounts violated our policy against spam and fake accounts by posting clickbait content to drive people to off-platform sites,” the spokesperson said.
“We don’t allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook and we’ve updated our inauthentic behavior policy to further improve our ability to counter new tactics.
“Our investigations are continuing and, as always, we’ll take action if we find any violations.”
A mysterious Israeli-based group uses 21 Facebook pages to churn out more than a thousand coordinated fake news posts per week to more than a million followers around the world. It milks the traffic for revenue from digital advertising.
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who earlier this year became the first Muslim women to serve in the US Congress, have been singled out for vicious attacks by the coordinated effort.
Somali-born Omar is the most frequent target. She has been mentioned in more than 1,400 posts since the network began two years ago. Tlaib has been mentioned nearly 1,200 times. Both totals are far higher than any other member of Congress.
Omar and Tlaib are members of a group of progressive women of color known as “the squad” that also includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. They have been subject to racist insults from Donald Trump.
The Guardian uncovered contacts between a group of mysterious Israel-based accounts and 21 far-right Facebook pages across the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, Austria, Israel and Nigeria.
The posts exacerbate Islamophobia by amplifying far-right parties and vilifying Muslim and leftwing politicians. Their content is a blend of distorted news and pure fabrication.
An analysis by Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre indicated a single entity is coordinating the publication of content across the Facebook pages.
Using web archiving services and domain registry information, the Guardian has been able to confirm a key figure in the network is Ariel Elkaras, a thirtysomething jewelry salesman and online operator living on the outskirts of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
Several of the network’s websites were either taken down or had large amounts of content removed soon after the Guardian approached Elkaras for comment. Public posts on his Facebook profile were also deleted.
Elkaras did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and phone, but the Guardian was able to track him down in the Israeli town of Lod, near Tel Aviv, where he denied involvement in the network. “It’s nothing related to me,” he said through a translator.
The uncovering of the network is likely to fuel concerns that Facebook is failing to tackle disinformation and hate groups ahead of next year’s presidential election in the US.
Abbas Barzegar, director of research and advocacy at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: “Spreading disinformation and faux-reporting through pre-networked social media accounts and pseudo-news websites has been the preferred tactic of the Islamophobia industry for a very long time.
“These actors create entire media and information ecosystems that inscribe dangerous ideas and narratives in audiences across the world. The impact isn’t personal prejudice, alone. Rather, such disinformation impacts our political climate, actual laws, policies and overall culture.”
Somali-born Omar, the first member of the House of Representatives to wear a hijab in the chamber, has been subject to hundreds of online death threats. In September she accused Trump of putting her life at risk after the president retweeted a post that falsely claimed she partied on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Omar told the Guardian: “As this report makes clear, foreign interference – whether by individuals or governments – is still a grave threat to our democracy. These are malicious actors operating in a foreign country, Israel, spreading misinformation and hate speech to influence elections in the United States. The goal of these anti-Muslim hate campaigns is clear – they put Muslim lives here and around the world at risk and undermine our country’s commitment to religious pluralism.”
She also slammed Facebook for its role in allowing users to spread misinformation.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Facebook’s complacency is a threat to our democracy. It has become clear that they do not take seriously the degree to which they provide a platform for white nationalist hate and dangerous misinformation in this country and around the world. And there is a clear reason for this: they profit off it. I believe their inaction is a grave threat to people’s lives, to our democracy and to democracy around the world.
“When private corporations don’t act, we as a nation need to think seriously about ways to address the spread of misinformation while protecting core values like free speech.”
When the Guardian notified Facebook of its investigation, the company removed several pages and accounts “that appeared to be financially motivated”, a spokesperson said in a statement.
“These pages and accounts violated our policy against spam and fake accounts by posting clickbait content to drive people to off-platform sites,” the spokesperson said.
“We don’t allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook and we’ve updated our inauthentic behavior policy to further improve our ability to counter new tactics.
“Our investigations are continuing and, as always, we’ll take action if we find any violations.”
Corporate media’s mantra is ‘anyone but Sanders or Warren’ — and they’re doing the work of the extremely wealthy
Norman Solomon / Common Dreams- alternet
December 2, 2019
Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States—owned and sponsored by corporate giants—are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.
Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.
The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.
Critical reporting on debate performances and campaign operations has certainly been common. But the core of the “moderate” agenda routinely gets affirmation from elite journalists who told us in no uncertain terms four years ago that Hillary Clinton was obviously the nominee who could defeat Donald Trump.
This year, Sanders has taken most of the flak from reporters and pundits (often virtually indistinguishable), serving as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren. But as Warren gained ground in polling this fall, the attacks on her escalated—to the point that she now has a corporate media bullseye on her political back.
The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.
The Washington Post, owned by one of the world’s richest people Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren’s recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly—and falsely—referred to Medicare for All as “government-run healthcare” and “a government-run health plan.”
Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive “Medicare for All Who Want It” slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.
In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using insurance-industry talking points, he is deliberately confusing the current “choice” of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.
Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they’re routinely purveying such distortions themselves. Warren’s backtracking step on Medicare for All in mid-November was a tribute to media pressure in tandem with attacks from centrist opponents.
The idea of implementing some form of a substantial “wealth tax” has also been denigrated by many corporate-employed journalists. Countless pundits and political beat reporters have warned that proposals like a wealth tax, from Warren and Sanders, risk dragging Democrats down with voters. The truth is that such proposals are unpopular with the punditocracy and the extremely wealthy—while it’s a very different matter for most voters, who strongly favor a wealth tax.
On the same day this fall, the New York Times and the Washington Post published stories on Democratic elites’ “anxiety” about the presidential election. The Post wrote that Democrats “fret” Warren and Sanders “are too liberal to win a general election.” (With disdain, the article made a matter-of-fact reference to “the push for liberal purity.”) The Times similarly wrote of “persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election.” Contrary voices were absent in both news stories.
Assessing those articles, FAIR.org media analyst Julie Hollar pointed out: “The pieces interviewed a number of big donors and centrist party leaders, who fretted about their preferred candidate’s struggles and expressed hope for someone more corporate-friendly than Warren to enter the race and challenge her rise.”
Hollar added: “The thinking of powerful people in the Democratic Party is worth writing about. But it’s crucial not to just take their claims at face value. . . . What establishment Democrats are really worried about, of course, is their own power in the party, which is threatened by a surging left wing. Don’t look to their establishment media counterparts to report on that transparently.”
Part of the problem is the TV network that many Democrats (mistakenly) trust. MSNBC is becoming notorious for its hostility to Bernie Sanders, often expressed through egregious omission or mathematical fib if not direct antipathy.
Ongoing media analysis is crucial, but even more important is activist pushback against the 24/7 onslaught of corporate-minded propaganda, often couched as common sense and incontrovertible reality. Among the needed counterpunches are these:
You shouldn’t have to be an active supporter of Bernie Sanders (as I am) or of Elizabeth Warren to voice outrage about corporate media biases. What’s at stake includes democracy—the informed consent of the governed—and so much more.
History is unfolding in real time. It’s not a product on the media shelf, to be passively bought and consumed. As Bernie 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner says, “All that we love is on the line.”
Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.
The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.
Critical reporting on debate performances and campaign operations has certainly been common. But the core of the “moderate” agenda routinely gets affirmation from elite journalists who told us in no uncertain terms four years ago that Hillary Clinton was obviously the nominee who could defeat Donald Trump.
This year, Sanders has taken most of the flak from reporters and pundits (often virtually indistinguishable), serving as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren. But as Warren gained ground in polling this fall, the attacks on her escalated—to the point that she now has a corporate media bullseye on her political back.
The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.
The Washington Post, owned by one of the world’s richest people Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren’s recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly—and falsely—referred to Medicare for All as “government-run healthcare” and “a government-run health plan.”
Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive “Medicare for All Who Want It” slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.
In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using insurance-industry talking points, he is deliberately confusing the current “choice” of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.
Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they’re routinely purveying such distortions themselves. Warren’s backtracking step on Medicare for All in mid-November was a tribute to media pressure in tandem with attacks from centrist opponents.
The idea of implementing some form of a substantial “wealth tax” has also been denigrated by many corporate-employed journalists. Countless pundits and political beat reporters have warned that proposals like a wealth tax, from Warren and Sanders, risk dragging Democrats down with voters. The truth is that such proposals are unpopular with the punditocracy and the extremely wealthy—while it’s a very different matter for most voters, who strongly favor a wealth tax.
On the same day this fall, the New York Times and the Washington Post published stories on Democratic elites’ “anxiety” about the presidential election. The Post wrote that Democrats “fret” Warren and Sanders “are too liberal to win a general election.” (With disdain, the article made a matter-of-fact reference to “the push for liberal purity.”) The Times similarly wrote of “persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election.” Contrary voices were absent in both news stories.
Assessing those articles, FAIR.org media analyst Julie Hollar pointed out: “The pieces interviewed a number of big donors and centrist party leaders, who fretted about their preferred candidate’s struggles and expressed hope for someone more corporate-friendly than Warren to enter the race and challenge her rise.”
Hollar added: “The thinking of powerful people in the Democratic Party is worth writing about. But it’s crucial not to just take their claims at face value. . . . What establishment Democrats are really worried about, of course, is their own power in the party, which is threatened by a surging left wing. Don’t look to their establishment media counterparts to report on that transparently.”
Part of the problem is the TV network that many Democrats (mistakenly) trust. MSNBC is becoming notorious for its hostility to Bernie Sanders, often expressed through egregious omission or mathematical fib if not direct antipathy.
Ongoing media analysis is crucial, but even more important is activist pushback against the 24/7 onslaught of corporate-minded propaganda, often couched as common sense and incontrovertible reality. Among the needed counterpunches are these:
- Support progressive media outlets as they provide independent coverage of the presidential campaign
- Widely share, via email forwarding and social media, online pieces that you like. (Hopefully including this one.)
- Recognize, challenge, and organize against the corporate-media echo chamber that affects so many voters
You shouldn’t have to be an active supporter of Bernie Sanders (as I am) or of Elizabeth Warren to voice outrage about corporate media biases. What’s at stake includes democracy—the informed consent of the governed—and so much more.
History is unfolding in real time. It’s not a product on the media shelf, to be passively bought and consumed. As Bernie 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner says, “All that we love is on the line.”
Facebook
Defiant Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook policy to allow false ads
Zuckerberg says ‘people should be able to judge for themselves the character of politicians’ and compares alternative to censorship
Oliver Milman in New York
the guardian
Mon 2 Dec 2019 09.19 EST
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s decision to not take down political advertising that contains false information – and compared the alternative to censorship.
Challenged on CBS over the policy, which has raised concerns over misinformation campaigns that could distort elections, Zuckerberg refused to commit to any changes.
“What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments,” he said.
“And, you know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.”
Gayle King, co-host of CBS This Morning, pointed out that 200 Facebook employees wrote a letter asking Zuckerberg to reconsider as “free speech and paid speech are not the same”.
The Facebook co-founder was unmoved.
“Well, this is a clearly a very complex issue, and a lot of people have a lot of different opinions,” he said. “At the end of the day, I just think that in a democracy, people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”
He added: “I think that people should be able to judge for themselves the character of politicians.”
Zuckerberg has come under criticism from lawmakers including New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have warned that the 2020 presidential election will be influenced by paid-for false claims spread by the social media platform.
Similar fears have played out in the UK ahead of its general election this month. Facebook removed an ad by the Conservatives that showed BBC reporters seemingly decrying a “pointless delay to Brexit” – in fact the reporters were quoting politicians including prime minister Boris Johnson.
The BBC asked the Tories to take the ad down, only to be rebuffed. Facebook acquiesced, however, due to “intellectual property” concerns.
Facebook’s outsized role in funnelling false claims and fake news stories to voters has been highlighted since the election of Donald Trump as US president.
The company has been accused of giving a mainstream platform to extremist groups, with Guardian US recently reporting how two white nationalist organizations continued to operate Facebook pages months after a promised ban.
On CBS, King asked Zuckerberg about a meeting with Trump at the White House in October. Trump has previously said Facebook shouldn’t ban political ads.
Zuckerberg said: “We talked about a number of things that were on his mind. And some of the topics that you’d read about in the news around our work.”
Asked if Trump lobbied him, Zuckerberg said: “No. I mean, I don’t think that that’s … I think some of the stuff that people talk about or think gets discussed [in] these discussions are not really how that works.
“I also want to respect that it was a private dinner and … private discussion.”
Challenged on CBS over the policy, which has raised concerns over misinformation campaigns that could distort elections, Zuckerberg refused to commit to any changes.
“What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments,” he said.
“And, you know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.”
Gayle King, co-host of CBS This Morning, pointed out that 200 Facebook employees wrote a letter asking Zuckerberg to reconsider as “free speech and paid speech are not the same”.
The Facebook co-founder was unmoved.
“Well, this is a clearly a very complex issue, and a lot of people have a lot of different opinions,” he said. “At the end of the day, I just think that in a democracy, people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”
He added: “I think that people should be able to judge for themselves the character of politicians.”
Zuckerberg has come under criticism from lawmakers including New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have warned that the 2020 presidential election will be influenced by paid-for false claims spread by the social media platform.
Similar fears have played out in the UK ahead of its general election this month. Facebook removed an ad by the Conservatives that showed BBC reporters seemingly decrying a “pointless delay to Brexit” – in fact the reporters were quoting politicians including prime minister Boris Johnson.
The BBC asked the Tories to take the ad down, only to be rebuffed. Facebook acquiesced, however, due to “intellectual property” concerns.
Facebook’s outsized role in funnelling false claims and fake news stories to voters has been highlighted since the election of Donald Trump as US president.
The company has been accused of giving a mainstream platform to extremist groups, with Guardian US recently reporting how two white nationalist organizations continued to operate Facebook pages months after a promised ban.
On CBS, King asked Zuckerberg about a meeting with Trump at the White House in October. Trump has previously said Facebook shouldn’t ban political ads.
Zuckerberg said: “We talked about a number of things that were on his mind. And some of the topics that you’d read about in the news around our work.”
Asked if Trump lobbied him, Zuckerberg said: “No. I mean, I don’t think that that’s … I think some of the stuff that people talk about or think gets discussed [in] these discussions are not really how that works.
“I also want to respect that it was a private dinner and … private discussion.”
Press Watch: Political reporters still can’t handle the GOP’s moral and ethical collapse
The modern Republican Party has descended into lawlessness and lunacy. Most mainstream reporters won't say that
DAN FROOMKIN - salon
NOVEMBER 26, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
After two weeks of gripping testimony that established Donald Trump’s flagrant abuse of power beyond any reasonable doubt, after an effectively uncontested accusation that Republican conspiracy theories about Ukraine advance a Russian agenda, and after the ostensibly “moderate” members of Trump’s party actually hardened their support for the president, there is precisely one huge, overarching news story that demands to be written: That the GOP has fully descended into lawlessness and lunacy.
But our elite political reporters simply can’t bring themselves to say so. Over in the opinion sections, it’s a cacophony, almost entirely across the political spectrum. But in the news columns, it’s just another story with two sides and reporters aren’t taking either one.
The problem of course is that on one side, facts don’t matter. So equating both sides is not a neutral act. It means facts don’t matter to you, either. It’s a nihilistic way to cover politics.
The top of Greg Miller’s Washington Post article about Fiona Hill’s testimony was an extraordinary — possibly legendary — example of both-sides-ism, in which Miller tried to recast Hill’s blistering indictment of Republicans into a commentary on “the insidious forces — including the spread of conspiracy theories — infecting American politics.”
Miller wrote that Hill put the “unfolding Ukraine scandal in a broader political context” with her warnings “that the country’s susceptibility to baseless allegations and partisan infighting are more than unfortunate byproducts of this political era.”
And “above all, she spoke with palpable concern about the extent to which partisanship in the United States’ political system has weakened the country’s ability to agree on objective reality. ‘Our nation is being torn apart,’ she said. ‘Truth is questioned.’"
But as even Miller finally had to acknowledge, Hill’s testimony was actually “a bristling rebuke of Republican lawmakers — and by extension Trump — who have sought to sow doubt about Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.”
“Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
There was no equivalent critique of Democrats. This is not “the country’s susceptibility” — it is the Republicans’.
---
For a model of good coverage, look instead at how Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick and Eric Tucker covered Hill’s testimony for the Associated Press without any such attempts to impose false balance.
Nothing to see here
How jaded do you have to be to conclude that after an epic, historic two weeks of testimony, the needle hasn’t moved?
According to Peter Baker at the New York Times, “Trump was acting as if nothing had changed.” And “In a way, it had not”:
Everyone is playing their assigned role in a drama where the ending seems known in advance as the House of Representatives heads toward a likely party-line vote to impeach the president, followed by a Senate trial that will not convict him.
Trump was pleased, Baker reported credulously:
When it was all over and the witnesses had testified and the speeches were done, President Trump pronounced himself satisfied with the show. “We had a tremendous week with the hoax,” he declared on Friday as he addressed a room of collegiate athletes. “That’s really worked out incredibly well.”
Sure, that’s what Trump said. But Gabby Orr wrote for Politico, more credibly, that Trump is obsessed and terrified:
Six current administration officials and people close to the president described Trump as increasingly interested in how the investigation is affecting his political standing, and more paranoid than ever about Republican defections.
Will Stancil, a legal researcher and freelance writer, tweeted:
Will Stancil
@whstancil
· Nov 24, 2019
Replying to @whstancil
Peter Baker is a hack, writing this nonsensical garbage because he knows a certain kind of Elite Thinker will nod along sagely, even though even a few seconds’ critical thinking causes the whole idea to collapse. And then the New York Times puts it on the front page
Will Stancil
@whstancil
Understanding this moment in time is hard enough without people like Baker, who have no purpose at all except to mindlessly, idiotically cram events into prefab narratives that serve the interests of a tiny number of people who want to appear smart, savvy, and balanced
6:50 AM - Nov 24, 2019
Tough luck for Trump’s defenders
Marc Fisher and Mike DeBonis wrote a long article in the Washington Post that was sympathetic to House Republicans on account of how Trump’s own statements keep making it tougher for them to defend him – as if they had a good argument to make if Trump just didn’t tweet so much.
The president’s unsupported attacks on some of the key witnesses appearing over the past two weeks before the House Intelligence Committee not only surprised many of his Republican allies but also contradicted the narrative that they had settled on to describe why Trump’s actions in the Ukraine controversy do not justify his removal from office.
There were a few illuminating quotes in the story about the tough spot the Republicans are in. Here’s one acknowledging that he has no idea what Trump means, but is nevertheless a slave to the president’s base:
“His comments complicate things,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., “and in some cases, it’s excessive, but you’ll hear members saying it’s just Trump being Trump. He is just different, such a unique figure, and that’s one reason he won. Traditional politicians, including me, have a difficult time figuring out what he means. But the president is probably as popular as any Republican president has been within the party. When we go home, the criticism you get is for not being forceful enough in defending the president. Every Republican here knows the reality.”
Reporters understand what’s going on. They’re not stupid. So, for instance, Maggie Haberman accurately summed up Trump’s defensive tactics for the New York Times on Friday:
Facts that cut against his position have been declared false. Witnesses who have questioned his motives have been declared dishonest. Critics of his behavior are part of a corrupt, shadowy effort aiming to damage him.
But her article wasn’t a condemnation. No, it was just a look-ahead to the Senate phase.
No lessons learned
CBS’s “Face the Nation” invited inveterate liar and spinner Kellyanne Conway onto the show Sunday, despite growing discontent about news organizations offering people like her access to live TV.
And host Margaret Brennan really needs to change her default response from “Right” to something else. Maybe: “Seriously?”
Conway: They didn't hear anybody say when they were asked bribery? No. Extortion? No. Quid pro quo for the aid? No. Preconditions for a meeting? Did the president commit a crime? No, no, no every time. The closest they got to it was Sondland in his prepared remarks saying he thought there was a quid pro quo for a meeting.
Brennan: Right.
Conway: They had the meeting on Sept. 22 in New York. And also the aide went to Ukraine earlier than that.
Brennan: Right.
This tweet from a librarian with 362 followers had more than 13,700 likes:
Kate Sweeney
@sweeney_kate
Turned on Face the Nation.
Saw Kellyanne Conway.
Turned off Face the Nation.
I truly do not understand why reputable news organizations invite people who they know will lie to them.
8:04 AM - Nov 24, 2019
But our elite political reporters simply can’t bring themselves to say so. Over in the opinion sections, it’s a cacophony, almost entirely across the political spectrum. But in the news columns, it’s just another story with two sides and reporters aren’t taking either one.
The problem of course is that on one side, facts don’t matter. So equating both sides is not a neutral act. It means facts don’t matter to you, either. It’s a nihilistic way to cover politics.
The top of Greg Miller’s Washington Post article about Fiona Hill’s testimony was an extraordinary — possibly legendary — example of both-sides-ism, in which Miller tried to recast Hill’s blistering indictment of Republicans into a commentary on “the insidious forces — including the spread of conspiracy theories — infecting American politics.”
Miller wrote that Hill put the “unfolding Ukraine scandal in a broader political context” with her warnings “that the country’s susceptibility to baseless allegations and partisan infighting are more than unfortunate byproducts of this political era.”
And “above all, she spoke with palpable concern about the extent to which partisanship in the United States’ political system has weakened the country’s ability to agree on objective reality. ‘Our nation is being torn apart,’ she said. ‘Truth is questioned.’"
But as even Miller finally had to acknowledge, Hill’s testimony was actually “a bristling rebuke of Republican lawmakers — and by extension Trump — who have sought to sow doubt about Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.”
“Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
There was no equivalent critique of Democrats. This is not “the country’s susceptibility” — it is the Republicans’.
---
For a model of good coverage, look instead at how Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick and Eric Tucker covered Hill’s testimony for the Associated Press without any such attempts to impose false balance.
Nothing to see here
How jaded do you have to be to conclude that after an epic, historic two weeks of testimony, the needle hasn’t moved?
According to Peter Baker at the New York Times, “Trump was acting as if nothing had changed.” And “In a way, it had not”:
Everyone is playing their assigned role in a drama where the ending seems known in advance as the House of Representatives heads toward a likely party-line vote to impeach the president, followed by a Senate trial that will not convict him.
Trump was pleased, Baker reported credulously:
When it was all over and the witnesses had testified and the speeches were done, President Trump pronounced himself satisfied with the show. “We had a tremendous week with the hoax,” he declared on Friday as he addressed a room of collegiate athletes. “That’s really worked out incredibly well.”
Sure, that’s what Trump said. But Gabby Orr wrote for Politico, more credibly, that Trump is obsessed and terrified:
Six current administration officials and people close to the president described Trump as increasingly interested in how the investigation is affecting his political standing, and more paranoid than ever about Republican defections.
Will Stancil, a legal researcher and freelance writer, tweeted:
Will Stancil
@whstancil
· Nov 24, 2019
Replying to @whstancil
Peter Baker is a hack, writing this nonsensical garbage because he knows a certain kind of Elite Thinker will nod along sagely, even though even a few seconds’ critical thinking causes the whole idea to collapse. And then the New York Times puts it on the front page
Will Stancil
@whstancil
Understanding this moment in time is hard enough without people like Baker, who have no purpose at all except to mindlessly, idiotically cram events into prefab narratives that serve the interests of a tiny number of people who want to appear smart, savvy, and balanced
6:50 AM - Nov 24, 2019
Tough luck for Trump’s defenders
Marc Fisher and Mike DeBonis wrote a long article in the Washington Post that was sympathetic to House Republicans on account of how Trump’s own statements keep making it tougher for them to defend him – as if they had a good argument to make if Trump just didn’t tweet so much.
The president’s unsupported attacks on some of the key witnesses appearing over the past two weeks before the House Intelligence Committee not only surprised many of his Republican allies but also contradicted the narrative that they had settled on to describe why Trump’s actions in the Ukraine controversy do not justify his removal from office.
There were a few illuminating quotes in the story about the tough spot the Republicans are in. Here’s one acknowledging that he has no idea what Trump means, but is nevertheless a slave to the president’s base:
“His comments complicate things,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., “and in some cases, it’s excessive, but you’ll hear members saying it’s just Trump being Trump. He is just different, such a unique figure, and that’s one reason he won. Traditional politicians, including me, have a difficult time figuring out what he means. But the president is probably as popular as any Republican president has been within the party. When we go home, the criticism you get is for not being forceful enough in defending the president. Every Republican here knows the reality.”
Reporters understand what’s going on. They’re not stupid. So, for instance, Maggie Haberman accurately summed up Trump’s defensive tactics for the New York Times on Friday:
Facts that cut against his position have been declared false. Witnesses who have questioned his motives have been declared dishonest. Critics of his behavior are part of a corrupt, shadowy effort aiming to damage him.
But her article wasn’t a condemnation. No, it was just a look-ahead to the Senate phase.
No lessons learned
CBS’s “Face the Nation” invited inveterate liar and spinner Kellyanne Conway onto the show Sunday, despite growing discontent about news organizations offering people like her access to live TV.
And host Margaret Brennan really needs to change her default response from “Right” to something else. Maybe: “Seriously?”
Conway: They didn't hear anybody say when they were asked bribery? No. Extortion? No. Quid pro quo for the aid? No. Preconditions for a meeting? Did the president commit a crime? No, no, no every time. The closest they got to it was Sondland in his prepared remarks saying he thought there was a quid pro quo for a meeting.
Brennan: Right.
Conway: They had the meeting on Sept. 22 in New York. And also the aide went to Ukraine earlier than that.
Brennan: Right.
This tweet from a librarian with 362 followers had more than 13,700 likes:
Kate Sweeney
@sweeney_kate
Turned on Face the Nation.
Saw Kellyanne Conway.
Turned off Face the Nation.
I truly do not understand why reputable news organizations invite people who they know will lie to them.
8:04 AM - Nov 24, 2019
Ex-Fox News executive caught running a disinformation and fake news farm — using writers from Macedonia
November 21, 2019
By Sarah K. Burris - raw story
A New York Times expose revealed that Fox News paid writers in Macedonia to create click-bait that prompt Americans to fight more about issues.
According to the piece, both the left and right websites created by an international content farm to inflame people enough to click and share content. Conservative Edition News and Liberal Edition News intentionally writes stories with the purpose to infuriate each side for the purpose of generating hate-clicks, response articles and more. Headlines like “Austin sex-ed curriculum teaches kids how to obtain an abortion” and “HuffPost writer considers Christianity ‘dangerous'” give right-wing audiences fodder for anger to lash out at their counterparts.
“The sites are the work of Ken LaCorte, the former Fox News executive who was accused of killing a story about President Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film actress, before the 2016 election,” wrote The Times.
Young Macedonians in Veles were the ones “churning out disinformation” for the 2016 election campaign.
“Among Mr. LaCorte’s network was one writer who helped peddle a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton had ties to a pedophile ring,” the report explained.
According to reports from The Guardian and on BuzzFeed the Macedonian town of 55,000 people was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites. Wired described them as sites dominated with sensationalist, utterly fake news.
It was unknown who was behind all of the websites until recently, but the investigation and research at a security firm in Virginia discovered that there are several websites owned by LaCorte that are promoting disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and inflammatory content.
“While big tech companies like Google and Twitter are trying to distance themselves from divisive politics by restricting or banning political ads, Mr. LaCorte’s websites are a reminder that there is a cottage industry of small sites happy to stoke passions on both sides of the political aisle and cash in on that anger,” the report continued.
None of the stories have authors on them, and the bottom of the pages says “By Bivona Digital Inc.” It’s a company that uses an address often “reserved for transient sailors off the San Francisco Bay in Sausalito, California.”
When The Times reached out to LaCorte for comment, he claimed that he was creating “centrist-right” content, though he didn’t explain how a false news story about a pedophile ring is “centrist.” In that case, a gunman went to the Washington, DC pizza parlor cited in the story prepared to free the abused children in a basement that didn’t even exist. LaCorte said he’s heading up an effort to create a “digital news start-up with the stated goal of restoring faith in the media.”
“I wanted to try to find middle ground,” LaCorte said. “Unfortunately, the things that work best right now are hyperactive politics. On one hand, that’s at odds with what I want to do. But you can be more successful by playing the edgy clickbait game.”
The translation is that LaCorte is continuing placing the financial benefits of clickbait and propaganda over the “centrist-right” politics he purports to espouse. He also revealed that 1 percent of the entirety of the United States (nearly 3.3 million people) was reading his websites one day when he woke up.
“Where does that line turn from good business to ‘Eh, that’s sleazy’?” he asked rhetorically.
“The spreading of politically divisive content or even blatant disinformation and conspiracy theories by Americans is protected free speech. Security experts said the adoption of Russian tactics by profit-motivated Americans had made it much harder to track disinformation,” The Times explained.
“It’s this blending we’re most worried about,” the report cited Cindy Otis, the director of analysis at the cyber-security firm Nisos’. “It makes it much harder to determine motivation and even the actor.”
Read the full report at The New York Times.
According to the piece, both the left and right websites created by an international content farm to inflame people enough to click and share content. Conservative Edition News and Liberal Edition News intentionally writes stories with the purpose to infuriate each side for the purpose of generating hate-clicks, response articles and more. Headlines like “Austin sex-ed curriculum teaches kids how to obtain an abortion” and “HuffPost writer considers Christianity ‘dangerous'” give right-wing audiences fodder for anger to lash out at their counterparts.
“The sites are the work of Ken LaCorte, the former Fox News executive who was accused of killing a story about President Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film actress, before the 2016 election,” wrote The Times.
Young Macedonians in Veles were the ones “churning out disinformation” for the 2016 election campaign.
“Among Mr. LaCorte’s network was one writer who helped peddle a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton had ties to a pedophile ring,” the report explained.
According to reports from The Guardian and on BuzzFeed the Macedonian town of 55,000 people was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites. Wired described them as sites dominated with sensationalist, utterly fake news.
It was unknown who was behind all of the websites until recently, but the investigation and research at a security firm in Virginia discovered that there are several websites owned by LaCorte that are promoting disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and inflammatory content.
“While big tech companies like Google and Twitter are trying to distance themselves from divisive politics by restricting or banning political ads, Mr. LaCorte’s websites are a reminder that there is a cottage industry of small sites happy to stoke passions on both sides of the political aisle and cash in on that anger,” the report continued.
None of the stories have authors on them, and the bottom of the pages says “By Bivona Digital Inc.” It’s a company that uses an address often “reserved for transient sailors off the San Francisco Bay in Sausalito, California.”
When The Times reached out to LaCorte for comment, he claimed that he was creating “centrist-right” content, though he didn’t explain how a false news story about a pedophile ring is “centrist.” In that case, a gunman went to the Washington, DC pizza parlor cited in the story prepared to free the abused children in a basement that didn’t even exist. LaCorte said he’s heading up an effort to create a “digital news start-up with the stated goal of restoring faith in the media.”
“I wanted to try to find middle ground,” LaCorte said. “Unfortunately, the things that work best right now are hyperactive politics. On one hand, that’s at odds with what I want to do. But you can be more successful by playing the edgy clickbait game.”
The translation is that LaCorte is continuing placing the financial benefits of clickbait and propaganda over the “centrist-right” politics he purports to espouse. He also revealed that 1 percent of the entirety of the United States (nearly 3.3 million people) was reading his websites one day when he woke up.
“Where does that line turn from good business to ‘Eh, that’s sleazy’?” he asked rhetorically.
“The spreading of politically divisive content or even blatant disinformation and conspiracy theories by Americans is protected free speech. Security experts said the adoption of Russian tactics by profit-motivated Americans had made it much harder to track disinformation,” The Times explained.
“It’s this blending we’re most worried about,” the report cited Cindy Otis, the director of analysis at the cyber-security firm Nisos’. “It makes it much harder to determine motivation and even the actor.”
Read the full report at The New York Times.
Facebook
Dozens of Facebook lobbyists tied to members of Congress, investigation shows
Lobbyists worked for 29 current members of Congress, including Democratic party leaders, helping promote company’s interests
Alex Kotch of Sludge
the guardian
Wed 20 Nov 2019 05.27 EST
As tech giant Facebook grapples with congressional hearings over its policy allowing politicians to sponsor untruthful ads and its role in proliferating hate speech, dozens of its lobbyists have connections to members of Congress, likely giving them special access that helps them promote the company’s interests.
So far this year, Facebook has employed 68 federal lobbyists, 12 in-house employees and 56 from K Street firms – spending nearly $12.3m on federal lobbying through 30 September. Sludge dug through Center for Responsive Politics and Legistorm databases and found that out of these lobbyists only three have never held jobs in the federal government.
The Facebook lobbyists have worked for 29 current members of Congress – 18 representatives and 11 senators – including key Democratic party leaders.
Four of the lobbyists have worked in the office of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Two have worked in the office of Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Other Facebook lobbyists have worked for the majority leader Steny Hoyer , Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer , Senator Mark Warner, who is vice chair of the chamber’s Democratic caucus, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of Senate Democrats’ steering committee and a 2020 presidential candidate.
Some of these lobbyists have recently donated to their former bosses:
Thirty-two Facebook lobbyists worked for Democratic members of Congress, Democratic White Houses, or were hired by Democrats to serve as committee staffers, and 30 more worked for Republicans.
In contrast to the Democratic connections, no 2019 Facebook lobbyist has worked for current members of the Republican House and Senate leadership. However, several have worked for powerful GOP Senate committee chairmen.
Mason Street Consulting’s Susan Stoner Zook and Hollier and Associates’ William Hollier previously worked for Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo (. Hollier was Crapo’s chief of staff for a decade, from 1993 to 2003, and Zook was the senator’s legislative assistant from 2011-13.
Lobbyist Jen Olson, who is employed by Peck Madigan Jones, was legislative director for Senator Lindsey Graham), chair of the Senate judiciary committee. Facebook policy manager Myriah Jordan used to be Select Committee on Intelligence chair Senator Richar Burr’s general counsel. Jonathan Slemrod of Harbinger Strategies was legislative assistant and then campaign policy director for senator Marco Rubio , chair of the Small Business Committee.
These “revolving door” connections likely give the lobbyists better access to their former bosses, experts say. Such connections have been shown to be effective in influencing how members of Congress vote. A 2011 study on financial industry lobbying from two International Monetary Fund economists found that “if a lobbyist had worked for a legislator in the past, the legislator was very likely to vote in favor of lax regulation”.
Zook gave her old boss Crapo’s campaign $1,500 in June. Hollier gave Crapo $2,000 in 2017 and $4,000 in 2016. Olson gave Graham’s campaign the maximum per-election contribution of $2,700 in 2017. Slemrod gave Rubio’s campaign $1,000 in 2015 and donated $1,000 to another former boss, Senator John Cornyn , earlier this year.
Four Facebook lobbyists have worked for White House administrations. Henry of the GROUP DC was Joe Biden’s assistant for legislative affairs from 2009-11, while Biden was vice-president. Subject Matter’s Grant and in-house Facebook lobbyist Nkechi Iheme worked under Obama. Michael W Williams of the Williams Group was staff director and special legislative assistant to Bill Clinton from 1996-2000.
Facebook is set to break its annual lobbying spending record this year, having spent nearly $5m on federal lobbying in the third quarter alone.
While these connections likely give lobbyists better access to their former bosses, they don’t necessarily mean that the members of Congress act more favorably towards their lobbying clients.
Warner, for example, has been a frequent critic of Facebook, having written a document with 20 suggestions for how to increase regulation of the company and pressing it to reverse its position on false political ads.
Meanwhile, Pelosi has an additional connection to Facebook. Her husband, financial executive Paul Pelosi, owns between $550,000 and $1.1m worth of stock in Facebook, according to financial disclosures.
So far this year, Facebook has employed 68 federal lobbyists, 12 in-house employees and 56 from K Street firms – spending nearly $12.3m on federal lobbying through 30 September. Sludge dug through Center for Responsive Politics and Legistorm databases and found that out of these lobbyists only three have never held jobs in the federal government.
The Facebook lobbyists have worked for 29 current members of Congress – 18 representatives and 11 senators – including key Democratic party leaders.
Four of the lobbyists have worked in the office of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Two have worked in the office of Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Other Facebook lobbyists have worked for the majority leader Steny Hoyer , Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer , Senator Mark Warner, who is vice chair of the chamber’s Democratic caucus, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of Senate Democrats’ steering committee and a 2020 presidential candidate.
Some of these lobbyists have recently donated to their former bosses:
- Shanti Stanton, who was once a special assistant to Pelosi, gave her campaign $2,000 on 5 August.
- Sudafi Henry, who was Hoyer’s deputy outreach director from 2005-07, gave Hoyer’s campaigns $1,500 in 2018 and $500 in 2016.
- Cedric Grant, who was Jeffries’ chief of staff from 2013-17, gave Jeffries $500 in 2018.
- Luke Albee, who was Warner’s chief of staff from 2009-15, gave Warner’s campaign $1,000 in April 2019.
- Timothy Molino, counsel to Klobuchar from 2010-11, gave Klobuchar’s campaign $3,300 during the 2017-18 election cycle.
Thirty-two Facebook lobbyists worked for Democratic members of Congress, Democratic White Houses, or were hired by Democrats to serve as committee staffers, and 30 more worked for Republicans.
In contrast to the Democratic connections, no 2019 Facebook lobbyist has worked for current members of the Republican House and Senate leadership. However, several have worked for powerful GOP Senate committee chairmen.
Mason Street Consulting’s Susan Stoner Zook and Hollier and Associates’ William Hollier previously worked for Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo (. Hollier was Crapo’s chief of staff for a decade, from 1993 to 2003, and Zook was the senator’s legislative assistant from 2011-13.
Lobbyist Jen Olson, who is employed by Peck Madigan Jones, was legislative director for Senator Lindsey Graham), chair of the Senate judiciary committee. Facebook policy manager Myriah Jordan used to be Select Committee on Intelligence chair Senator Richar Burr’s general counsel. Jonathan Slemrod of Harbinger Strategies was legislative assistant and then campaign policy director for senator Marco Rubio , chair of the Small Business Committee.
These “revolving door” connections likely give the lobbyists better access to their former bosses, experts say. Such connections have been shown to be effective in influencing how members of Congress vote. A 2011 study on financial industry lobbying from two International Monetary Fund economists found that “if a lobbyist had worked for a legislator in the past, the legislator was very likely to vote in favor of lax regulation”.
Zook gave her old boss Crapo’s campaign $1,500 in June. Hollier gave Crapo $2,000 in 2017 and $4,000 in 2016. Olson gave Graham’s campaign the maximum per-election contribution of $2,700 in 2017. Slemrod gave Rubio’s campaign $1,000 in 2015 and donated $1,000 to another former boss, Senator John Cornyn , earlier this year.
Four Facebook lobbyists have worked for White House administrations. Henry of the GROUP DC was Joe Biden’s assistant for legislative affairs from 2009-11, while Biden was vice-president. Subject Matter’s Grant and in-house Facebook lobbyist Nkechi Iheme worked under Obama. Michael W Williams of the Williams Group was staff director and special legislative assistant to Bill Clinton from 1996-2000.
Facebook is set to break its annual lobbying spending record this year, having spent nearly $5m on federal lobbying in the third quarter alone.
While these connections likely give lobbyists better access to their former bosses, they don’t necessarily mean that the members of Congress act more favorably towards their lobbying clients.
Warner, for example, has been a frequent critic of Facebook, having written a document with 20 suggestions for how to increase regulation of the company and pressing it to reverse its position on false political ads.
Meanwhile, Pelosi has an additional connection to Facebook. Her husband, financial executive Paul Pelosi, owns between $550,000 and $1.1m worth of stock in Facebook, according to financial disclosures.
‘Close friend of the president’: The Hill’s owner let columnist feed Trump conspiracy stories — here’s why
November 19, 2019
By Tom Boggioni - raw story
According to a report from CNN, the owner of “The Hill” has managed to fly under the radar as Donald Trump is facing impeachment despite the fact that he personally approved of conspiracy-based columns by the now-departed John Solomon that the president has used to defend his Ukraine dealings.
As CNN notes, “James ‘Jimmy’ Finkelstein, the owner of The Hill newspaper, is not a widely known media executive, but he is one of the era’s most consequential,” in that he oversaw Solomon columns before the journalist left to work for Fox News.
“While Solomon has received significant media attention for his work at The Hill, Finkelstein has stayed out of the headlines, despite having himself played a crucial role in the saga,” the report states. “Beyond his relationship with Solomon, Trump, and Giuliani, Finkelstein was Solomon’s direct supervisor at The Hill and created the conditions which permitted Solomon to publish his conspiratorial stories without the traditional oversight implemented at news outlets. And he has kept a watchful eye on the newspaper’s coverage to ensure it is not too critical of the President.”
According to a former Hill employee, “Solomon is a symptom of the larger problem of Jimmy Finkelstein.”
That employee was not alone in their unhappiness with Solomon’s columns that built upon a reported interview with General Yuriy Lutsenko, the former Ukraine prosecutor general, who claimed former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch gave him a “do-not-prosecute list,” that has led the president to accuse former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter of corruption.
According to current and former Hill staffers, there was internal pushback against the columns.
“Those people described a staff still in “revolt” over Solomon’s columns and the way they were handled, including a lack of communication to employees about them even after the articles were thrown into serious question by witnesses in the impeachment inquiry,” the CNN report states.
“Finkelstein has been friends with Trump for decades. In fact, according to a former employee at The Hill, ‘he boasts that he’s a close friend’ of the President. ‘Getting a phone call from Trump would fill him with joy,'” a former Hill staffer recalled.
“Trump himself has also privately acknowledged his relationship with Finkelstein. During an Oval Office interview with The Hill, according to a person with direct knowledge of the incident, Trump asked one of the outlet’s staffers to send along his greetings to Finkelstein. ‘Tell Jimmy I said hello,’ Trump told the staffer,” the report states. “Finkelstein’s wife, Pamela Gross, who worked at CNN but left in 2017, is close with Melania Trump. Gross threw a baby shower for Melania Trump, according to a person familiar with the event.”
“Finkelstein and Gross are also both close with [Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, who currently serves as Trump’s personal attorney. Finkelstein often hosts social gatherings at his Hamptons home and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Giuliani and his girlfriend spent multiple weekends at the residence this past summer,” the report continues.
“Jimmy is the one who hired John Solomon,” a former employee explained. “The editors didn’t want him there,” with another noting
Finkelstein personally hires members of The Hill’s senior management.
“I remember almost immediately thinking, ‘Why is he writing?'” the former employee stated with CNN adding, “Solomon already had earned a reputation for conspiratorial work when he reported on things like the ‘deep state’ for Circa, a now-defunct conservative news website.”
“It made for an awkward power dynamic in the newsroom,” explained a ex-Hill staffer. “You had staff on the news side objecting to Solomon’s coverage, but [the newsroom leaders] were a bit powerless.”
Another added, “Finkelstein ‘monitored’ The Hill’s coverage ‘to make sure it’s not too anti-Trump.'”
“There was always this understanding in the newsroom that Jimmy was friendly with Trump and people needed to be aware of it,” said the second former employee.
“The damage his work caused to The Hill’s reputation, however, still remains. But management has mostly declined to communicate directly with staff,” CNN reports. “Prior to Monday, there had been no outreach from management about what The Hill was going to do in regards to Solomon’s reporting, which has come under increased scrutiny with witnesses in the impeachment probe throwing cold water on it.”
“The staff is in revolt right now. People are very upset … No internal email, no internal meeting,” one employee told CNN. “Just nothing communicated from above.”
You can read more here.
As CNN notes, “James ‘Jimmy’ Finkelstein, the owner of The Hill newspaper, is not a widely known media executive, but he is one of the era’s most consequential,” in that he oversaw Solomon columns before the journalist left to work for Fox News.
“While Solomon has received significant media attention for his work at The Hill, Finkelstein has stayed out of the headlines, despite having himself played a crucial role in the saga,” the report states. “Beyond his relationship with Solomon, Trump, and Giuliani, Finkelstein was Solomon’s direct supervisor at The Hill and created the conditions which permitted Solomon to publish his conspiratorial stories without the traditional oversight implemented at news outlets. And he has kept a watchful eye on the newspaper’s coverage to ensure it is not too critical of the President.”
According to a former Hill employee, “Solomon is a symptom of the larger problem of Jimmy Finkelstein.”
That employee was not alone in their unhappiness with Solomon’s columns that built upon a reported interview with General Yuriy Lutsenko, the former Ukraine prosecutor general, who claimed former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch gave him a “do-not-prosecute list,” that has led the president to accuse former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter of corruption.
According to current and former Hill staffers, there was internal pushback against the columns.
“Those people described a staff still in “revolt” over Solomon’s columns and the way they were handled, including a lack of communication to employees about them even after the articles were thrown into serious question by witnesses in the impeachment inquiry,” the CNN report states.
“Finkelstein has been friends with Trump for decades. In fact, according to a former employee at The Hill, ‘he boasts that he’s a close friend’ of the President. ‘Getting a phone call from Trump would fill him with joy,'” a former Hill staffer recalled.
“Trump himself has also privately acknowledged his relationship with Finkelstein. During an Oval Office interview with The Hill, according to a person with direct knowledge of the incident, Trump asked one of the outlet’s staffers to send along his greetings to Finkelstein. ‘Tell Jimmy I said hello,’ Trump told the staffer,” the report states. “Finkelstein’s wife, Pamela Gross, who worked at CNN but left in 2017, is close with Melania Trump. Gross threw a baby shower for Melania Trump, according to a person familiar with the event.”
“Finkelstein and Gross are also both close with [Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, who currently serves as Trump’s personal attorney. Finkelstein often hosts social gatherings at his Hamptons home and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Giuliani and his girlfriend spent multiple weekends at the residence this past summer,” the report continues.
“Jimmy is the one who hired John Solomon,” a former employee explained. “The editors didn’t want him there,” with another noting
Finkelstein personally hires members of The Hill’s senior management.
“I remember almost immediately thinking, ‘Why is he writing?'” the former employee stated with CNN adding, “Solomon already had earned a reputation for conspiratorial work when he reported on things like the ‘deep state’ for Circa, a now-defunct conservative news website.”
“It made for an awkward power dynamic in the newsroom,” explained a ex-Hill staffer. “You had staff on the news side objecting to Solomon’s coverage, but [the newsroom leaders] were a bit powerless.”
Another added, “Finkelstein ‘monitored’ The Hill’s coverage ‘to make sure it’s not too anti-Trump.'”
“There was always this understanding in the newsroom that Jimmy was friendly with Trump and people needed to be aware of it,” said the second former employee.
“The damage his work caused to The Hill’s reputation, however, still remains. But management has mostly declined to communicate directly with staff,” CNN reports. “Prior to Monday, there had been no outreach from management about what The Hill was going to do in regards to Solomon’s reporting, which has come under increased scrutiny with witnesses in the impeachment probe throwing cold water on it.”
“The staff is in revolt right now. People are very upset … No internal email, no internal meeting,” one employee told CNN. “Just nothing communicated from above.”
You can read more here.
Outcry after Facebook sponsors gala featuring Brett Kavanaugh
Company is listed as a ‘gold circle’ sponsor for rightwing group Federalist Society dinner where justice will be keynote speaker
Edward Helmore in New York
the guardian
Thu 14 Nov 2019 16.48 EST
Facebook is facing criticism for sponsoring the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the powerful rightwing legal group behind the nomination of the conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The world’s largest social media company is listed as a “gold circle” sponsor of the 2019 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, and is featured in the guidebook app for the event, where Kavanaugh was scheduled as the keynote speaker on Thursday evening.
The Federalist Society has played a key role in the decades-long Republican strategy to pack US courts with conservatives, which has been advanced under Donald Trump’s administration. The group’s executive vice-president, Leonard Leo, advised the president on Kavanaugh’s controversial appointment.
Demand Justice, the not-for-profit group which aims to motivate progressives on issues related to the federal judiciary, released an advert calling on supporters to “tell Facebook: stop funding the fight to normalize Brett Kavanaugh”.
The event drew protests on Thursday evening, including a large video screen playing the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, the California psychologist who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Kavanaugh’s appointment was subsequently confirmed despite Ford’s testimony.
Marchers gathered with signs amid chants of “I believe Anita Hill. I believe Dr Ford.”
This is not the first time Facebook has drawn scrutiny over Kavanaugh. The company’s head of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, was spotted sitting behind Kavanaugh during his 2018 Senate judiciary committee hearing.
“Facebook should not be sponsoring the rehabbing of Brett Kavanaugh’s reputation when Dr Blasey Ford remains unable to resume a normal life after bravely coming forward last year,” Katie O’Connor, the senior counsel for Demand Justice, told the Verge. “You can claim to respect survivors of sexual assault or you can pay for a celebration of Brett Kavanaugh, but you can’t do both.”
Kaplan’s attendence, the New York Times reported at the time, “prompted anger and shock among many Facebook employees. Kaplan later apologized in a note to Facebook staff, saying, ‘I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one – internally and externally.’”
Facebook’s sponsorship of the Federalist Society’s dinner, which was first reported by Popular Information, will now renew anxiety about a company which recently decided that it will not vet political advertising for accuracy in the run-up to the 2020 US elections.
Facebook’s fledgling news initiative recently ran into renewed controversy over ties with far-right organisations, just two weeks after the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, struggled to explain why ultra-conservative Breitbart News belongs on its list of “trusted” news sources.
The company was widely held to have hosted misinformation ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook has not revealed how much it has paid to sponsor the dinner. The company spokesman Andy Stone told Popular Information that Facebook supports a broad swath of organisations across the political spectrum. These include the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society’s liberal counterpart.
Stone said “purposely” focusing on its support for one organization would serve to “distract from our lengthy track record of supporting groups from across the political spectrum”.
The world’s largest social media company is listed as a “gold circle” sponsor of the 2019 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, and is featured in the guidebook app for the event, where Kavanaugh was scheduled as the keynote speaker on Thursday evening.
The Federalist Society has played a key role in the decades-long Republican strategy to pack US courts with conservatives, which has been advanced under Donald Trump’s administration. The group’s executive vice-president, Leonard Leo, advised the president on Kavanaugh’s controversial appointment.
Demand Justice, the not-for-profit group which aims to motivate progressives on issues related to the federal judiciary, released an advert calling on supporters to “tell Facebook: stop funding the fight to normalize Brett Kavanaugh”.
The event drew protests on Thursday evening, including a large video screen playing the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, the California psychologist who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Kavanaugh’s appointment was subsequently confirmed despite Ford’s testimony.
Marchers gathered with signs amid chants of “I believe Anita Hill. I believe Dr Ford.”
This is not the first time Facebook has drawn scrutiny over Kavanaugh. The company’s head of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, was spotted sitting behind Kavanaugh during his 2018 Senate judiciary committee hearing.
“Facebook should not be sponsoring the rehabbing of Brett Kavanaugh’s reputation when Dr Blasey Ford remains unable to resume a normal life after bravely coming forward last year,” Katie O’Connor, the senior counsel for Demand Justice, told the Verge. “You can claim to respect survivors of sexual assault or you can pay for a celebration of Brett Kavanaugh, but you can’t do both.”
Kaplan’s attendence, the New York Times reported at the time, “prompted anger and shock among many Facebook employees. Kaplan later apologized in a note to Facebook staff, saying, ‘I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one – internally and externally.’”
Facebook’s sponsorship of the Federalist Society’s dinner, which was first reported by Popular Information, will now renew anxiety about a company which recently decided that it will not vet political advertising for accuracy in the run-up to the 2020 US elections.
Facebook’s fledgling news initiative recently ran into renewed controversy over ties with far-right organisations, just two weeks after the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, struggled to explain why ultra-conservative Breitbart News belongs on its list of “trusted” news sources.
The company was widely held to have hosted misinformation ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook has not revealed how much it has paid to sponsor the dinner. The company spokesman Andy Stone told Popular Information that Facebook supports a broad swath of organisations across the political spectrum. These include the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society’s liberal counterpart.
Stone said “purposely” focusing on its support for one organization would serve to “distract from our lengthy track record of supporting groups from across the political spectrum”.
Majority of anti-vaxx ads on Facebook are funded by just two organizations
Study finds Robert F Kennedy Jr’s World Mercury Project and Larry Cook’s Stop Mandatory Vaccinations bought 54% of ads
Jessica Glenza in New York
the guardian
Thu 14 Nov 2019 02.00 EST
The majority of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines are funded by two organizations run by well-known anti-vaccination activists, a new study in the journal Vaccine has found.
The World Mercury Project chaired by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, a project of campaigner Larry Cook, bought 54% of the anti-vaccine ads shown on the platform during the study period.
“Absolutely we were surprised,” said David Broniatowski, a professor of engineering at George Washington University, one of the authors of the report. “These two individuals were generating the majority of the content.”
Cook uses crowd-funding platforms to raise money for Facebook ads and his personal expenses. The crowd-funding platform GoFundMe banned Cook’s fundraisers in March 2019. YouTube has demonetized Cook’s videos.
Kennedy is the son of the former US attorney general Bobby Kennedy. He also has a nonprofit focused on environmental causes. Kennedy’s brother, sister and niece publicly criticized his “dangerous misinformation” about vaccines in May. They called his work against vaccination, “tragically wrong”.
In fact, vaccines are one of the safest and more effective medical interventions ever developed.
The Vaccine journal study is the first to analyze anti-vaccine ads in Facebook’s advertising archive. The archive is an ad disclosure database Facebook created after the platform was criticized for spreading untraceable misinformation during the Brexit referendum and 2016 US presidential campaign.
Facebook has more than two billion users and roughly 68% of Americans get their news from the platform, the study said. In 2019, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy as one of the world’s top 10 global health threats.
Facebook’s micro-targeting algorithms, unlike television, radio or newspapers, have allowed anti-vaccine groups to home in on individuals who might be susceptible to doubts about vaccines. In particular, women and parents of young children have been targeted by Stop Mandatory Vaccination, and Cook was even censured by the UK Advertising Standards Authority last year.
“Unless you’re in the target audience you’re not going to see an ad, so it’s hard to know what other organizations might be running,” said Emily Lowther, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Hospitals Association, which has had pro-vaccination ads automatically removed from Facebook. It is unclear why Facebook removed the ads.
“From our organizational perspective, vaccine misinformation causes real harm to individuals and their communities.”
Researchers from George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland analyzed more than 500 ads posted between December 2018 and February 2019, when Facebook again updated its vaccine-related ads policies. Of the ads, 163 were pro-vaccine, and 145 promoted alleged harms of vaccination.
While the pro-vaccination messages came from 83 unique organizations within healthcare, 54% of anti-vaccine messages came from just two buyers: the organizations led by Kennedy and Cook.
Anti-vaccine ads also tended to be seen by more people, and to have larger budgets. With up to $499 per ad, anti-vaccine ads “routinely reached audiences between 5,000 and 50,000 people”. Often, they also linked back to products people could buy, including “natural” remedies, books and seminars.
A typical ad run by Stop Mandatory Vaccinations alleges, “Healthy 14 week old infant gets 8 vaccines and dies within 24 h (sic)”.
Researchers also said new Facebook rules established to promote transparency are actually penalizing pro-vaccination ads by hospitals and healthcare providers.
“Facebook is easy enough to game if you can figure out which combination of words will get flagged,” said Nicholas Marcouiller, a digital strategist with Tunheim, which crafts ads for the Minnesota Hospitals Association. “We don’t adjust our messaging to get past them.”
Marcouiller said most of the hospital association’s ads are automatically flagged as politically sensitive, and that social media workers then have to re-submit them to Facebook for human review, a time-consuming process.
“It isn’t surprising that someone who is thinking critically can craft an ad to run on the system,” said Marcouiller. “It’s a luxury Minnesota has a strong enough hospital association to take on that role for our state.”
By contrast, anti-vaccine groups are specialists, Broniatowski said. They post dozens of anti-vaccine ads per year, and are well acquainted with Facebook’s new disclosure requirements.
“Although they are spreading misinformation, they are following the letter of the terms,” said Broniatowski. “This is a situation where the letter of the terms is not consistent with the intent of the terms.”
A Facebook company spokesperson said: “We tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and connecting people with authoritative information from experts on the topic. We partner with leading public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, which has publicly identified vaccine hoaxes – if these hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them – including rejecting ads.”
The World Mercury Project chaired by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, a project of campaigner Larry Cook, bought 54% of the anti-vaccine ads shown on the platform during the study period.
“Absolutely we were surprised,” said David Broniatowski, a professor of engineering at George Washington University, one of the authors of the report. “These two individuals were generating the majority of the content.”
Cook uses crowd-funding platforms to raise money for Facebook ads and his personal expenses. The crowd-funding platform GoFundMe banned Cook’s fundraisers in March 2019. YouTube has demonetized Cook’s videos.
Kennedy is the son of the former US attorney general Bobby Kennedy. He also has a nonprofit focused on environmental causes. Kennedy’s brother, sister and niece publicly criticized his “dangerous misinformation” about vaccines in May. They called his work against vaccination, “tragically wrong”.
In fact, vaccines are one of the safest and more effective medical interventions ever developed.
The Vaccine journal study is the first to analyze anti-vaccine ads in Facebook’s advertising archive. The archive is an ad disclosure database Facebook created after the platform was criticized for spreading untraceable misinformation during the Brexit referendum and 2016 US presidential campaign.
Facebook has more than two billion users and roughly 68% of Americans get their news from the platform, the study said. In 2019, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy as one of the world’s top 10 global health threats.
Facebook’s micro-targeting algorithms, unlike television, radio or newspapers, have allowed anti-vaccine groups to home in on individuals who might be susceptible to doubts about vaccines. In particular, women and parents of young children have been targeted by Stop Mandatory Vaccination, and Cook was even censured by the UK Advertising Standards Authority last year.
“Unless you’re in the target audience you’re not going to see an ad, so it’s hard to know what other organizations might be running,” said Emily Lowther, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Hospitals Association, which has had pro-vaccination ads automatically removed from Facebook. It is unclear why Facebook removed the ads.
“From our organizational perspective, vaccine misinformation causes real harm to individuals and their communities.”
Researchers from George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland analyzed more than 500 ads posted between December 2018 and February 2019, when Facebook again updated its vaccine-related ads policies. Of the ads, 163 were pro-vaccine, and 145 promoted alleged harms of vaccination.
While the pro-vaccination messages came from 83 unique organizations within healthcare, 54% of anti-vaccine messages came from just two buyers: the organizations led by Kennedy and Cook.
Anti-vaccine ads also tended to be seen by more people, and to have larger budgets. With up to $499 per ad, anti-vaccine ads “routinely reached audiences between 5,000 and 50,000 people”. Often, they also linked back to products people could buy, including “natural” remedies, books and seminars.
A typical ad run by Stop Mandatory Vaccinations alleges, “Healthy 14 week old infant gets 8 vaccines and dies within 24 h (sic)”.
Researchers also said new Facebook rules established to promote transparency are actually penalizing pro-vaccination ads by hospitals and healthcare providers.
“Facebook is easy enough to game if you can figure out which combination of words will get flagged,” said Nicholas Marcouiller, a digital strategist with Tunheim, which crafts ads for the Minnesota Hospitals Association. “We don’t adjust our messaging to get past them.”
Marcouiller said most of the hospital association’s ads are automatically flagged as politically sensitive, and that social media workers then have to re-submit them to Facebook for human review, a time-consuming process.
“It isn’t surprising that someone who is thinking critically can craft an ad to run on the system,” said Marcouiller. “It’s a luxury Minnesota has a strong enough hospital association to take on that role for our state.”
By contrast, anti-vaccine groups are specialists, Broniatowski said. They post dozens of anti-vaccine ads per year, and are well acquainted with Facebook’s new disclosure requirements.
“Although they are spreading misinformation, they are following the letter of the terms,” said Broniatowski. “This is a situation where the letter of the terms is not consistent with the intent of the terms.”
A Facebook company spokesperson said: “We tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and connecting people with authoritative information from experts on the topic. We partner with leading public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, which has publicly identified vaccine hoaxes – if these hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them – including rejecting ads.”
Black Facebook staff describe workplace racism in anonymous letter
A group of Facebook workers say they are treated as if they ‘do not belong’ at the company
Mario Koran
the guardian
Wed 13 Nov 2019 09.24 EST
One year after a former Facebook manager accused the company of having “a black people problem” – failing its black employees by allowing the proliferation of a hostile workplace culture — an anonymous group of tech workers at the social media giant have penned a letter in which they argue that the problem has only metastasized.
“Racism, discrimination, bias, and aggression do not come from the big moments,” they write. “It’s in the small actions that mount up over time and build into a culture where we are only meant to be seen as quotas, but never heard, never acknowledged, never recognized, and never accepted.”
The memo, published last week on Medium, includes descriptions of discrimination and hostility that 12 current and former employees of color, including black and Latinx workers, said they’ve experienced at the company. The writers say the alleged incidents all had witnesses and corroboration.
One Facebook program manager said they were told by two white employees to clean up after their breakfast mess and that when the employee raised the issue their supervisor only said the worker should “dress more professionally”. Other writers said supervisors and colleagues called them aggressive and arrogant for sharing opinions in ways similar to their white colleagues.
“[W]e are sad. Angry. Oppressed. Depressed. And treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here,” employees write in the memo.
The employees further alleged they were brushed aside by human resources staff when they asked that the aggressions be addressed.
Facebook did not immediately respond to an email from the Guardian, but in a statement sent to reporters on Friday, Bertie Thomson, Facebook’s vice-president of corporate communications, apologized.
“No one at Facebook, or anywhere, should have to put up with this behavior,” Thomson wrote. “We are sorry. It goes against everything that we stand for as a company. We’re listening and working hard to do better.”
The memo on Medium included screenshots of an app that allows Facebook employees to comment anonymously on issues and colleagues at the site.
“These people make it seem like they work for the KKK,” one staff member reportedly wrote, referring to employees of color and last year’s viral post from Mark Luckie, the former employee who thrust the company’s race relations into the spotlight.
“They should feel privileged that they were diversity hires and got into the company after we lowered our hiring standards. That’s just my opinion, though.” The screenshot is followed by a poll showing that more than 66% of respondents felt that black employees “just complain to get attention”.
The recent letter has garnered buzz, but concerns over race relations at Facebook are long-standing. A 2013 diversity report showed that the companys’s US workforce – in particular its leadership – was dominated by white men, while black and Hispanic employees made up just 2% and 4% of its staff, respectively. Two years later, its percentage of black employees had barely changed.
Luckie, the former Facebook employee, wrote in his 2018 memo that the company’s lack of diversity has led to racially biased content removal and account suspensions. In a claim echoed by this year’s anonymous letter, Luckie wrote that Facebook leadership paid strong lip service to creating equitable policies and building a diverse staff, but doesn’t back up its stated convictions in practice.
“In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people”, Luckie wrote last year.
“Racism, discrimination, bias, and aggression do not come from the big moments,” they write. “It’s in the small actions that mount up over time and build into a culture where we are only meant to be seen as quotas, but never heard, never acknowledged, never recognized, and never accepted.”
The memo, published last week on Medium, includes descriptions of discrimination and hostility that 12 current and former employees of color, including black and Latinx workers, said they’ve experienced at the company. The writers say the alleged incidents all had witnesses and corroboration.
One Facebook program manager said they were told by two white employees to clean up after their breakfast mess and that when the employee raised the issue their supervisor only said the worker should “dress more professionally”. Other writers said supervisors and colleagues called them aggressive and arrogant for sharing opinions in ways similar to their white colleagues.
“[W]e are sad. Angry. Oppressed. Depressed. And treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here,” employees write in the memo.
The employees further alleged they were brushed aside by human resources staff when they asked that the aggressions be addressed.
Facebook did not immediately respond to an email from the Guardian, but in a statement sent to reporters on Friday, Bertie Thomson, Facebook’s vice-president of corporate communications, apologized.
“No one at Facebook, or anywhere, should have to put up with this behavior,” Thomson wrote. “We are sorry. It goes against everything that we stand for as a company. We’re listening and working hard to do better.”
The memo on Medium included screenshots of an app that allows Facebook employees to comment anonymously on issues and colleagues at the site.
“These people make it seem like they work for the KKK,” one staff member reportedly wrote, referring to employees of color and last year’s viral post from Mark Luckie, the former employee who thrust the company’s race relations into the spotlight.
“They should feel privileged that they were diversity hires and got into the company after we lowered our hiring standards. That’s just my opinion, though.” The screenshot is followed by a poll showing that more than 66% of respondents felt that black employees “just complain to get attention”.
The recent letter has garnered buzz, but concerns over race relations at Facebook are long-standing. A 2013 diversity report showed that the companys’s US workforce – in particular its leadership – was dominated by white men, while black and Hispanic employees made up just 2% and 4% of its staff, respectively. Two years later, its percentage of black employees had barely changed.
Luckie, the former Facebook employee, wrote in his 2018 memo that the company’s lack of diversity has led to racially biased content removal and account suspensions. In a claim echoed by this year’s anonymous letter, Luckie wrote that Facebook leadership paid strong lip service to creating equitable policies and building a diverse staff, but doesn’t back up its stated convictions in practice.
“In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people”, Luckie wrote last year.
Facebook's top news executive has her own media outlet — and it's been savaging Elizabeth Warren
popular info
11/11/19
Former NBC News anchor Campbell Brown is a top Facebook executive who was hired in January 2017 to lead the company's "news partnerships team." That means Brown is in charge of "Facebook News," the company's high-profile new effort to feature "quality news" in a dedicated tab. She is also a co-founder and director of her own media outlet that, in recent weeks, has harshly attacked one of the leading Democratic candidates for president, Elizabeth Warren.
In 2015, Brown co-founded The 74, which focuses on the public education system, and served as editor-in-chief. Even after joining Facebook in 2017, Brown has maintained an active role in The 74, where she is a member of the board of directors. According to documents filed with the IRS in 2017, Brown dedicated five hours per week — the equivalent of a month-and-a-half of full-time work — working for The 74.
That's the same amount of time Brown spent on The 74 prior to joining Facebook. (2017 is the most recent year that this information is publicly available.)
Beginning this fall, The 74 has harshly criticized presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. On October 23, The 74 published an article with this headline: "Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan Is Exactly What We Need — If Our Goal Is to Make the Achievement Gap Permanent." The piece described Warren's detailed education plan as "a cut-and-paste genuflect to the public relations departments of America’s national teachers unions." It goes on to claim that Warren is not a "straight shooter" and lacks a "moral center." The piece eventually dispenses with education policy altogether and launches into a diatribe of attacks on Warren:
She’s a millionaire who raves about socialism. She was Republican before she was a Democrat. She was for school choice before she was against it. She was for charter schools before she was against them. She was for standardized testing before she was against it.
She was Native American before she wasn’t.
This piece is not an aberration. An October 10 piece described Warren as "the second coming of Karl Marx."
An October 24 column accuses Warren of standing "against an institution designed to create opportunity for our nation’s children." Warren, according to the article, wants to "override… the clear preferences of the black and brown voters whom progressives claim to fight for."
An October 28 piece describes Warren as "another tired politician signing up to pledge undying loyalty to a system that is so clearly failing too many of our children." The column says Warren backs "the regressive status quo that leads our children into the school-to-prison pipeline."
Brown features her affiliation with The 74 on both her Facebook page and her Twitter profile.
Facebook did not answer a detailed set of questions about Brown's current duties at The 74 and whether there was a conflict with her work at Facebook. But the company sent Popular Information the following statement: "The 74 is not part of Facebook News. Campbell’s work with The 74 is well-known and she’s been transparent about her role with the nonprofit for many years.“
Campbell Brown's friend Betsy DeVos
Both Brown and The 74 are tightly linked to Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education. DeVos, who Brown calls a "friend," provided a two-year grant through her family foundation to help launch The 74. (The 74 has not disclosed the amount of DeVos' contribution.) Brown also served on the board of The American Federation for Children (AFC), a non-profit that DeVos founded and chaired.
The AFC is a right-wing organization that spends heavily to support Republicans at the state level. It spent millions, for example, to support former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) and his allies. The 74 and the AFC co-sponsored a Republican presidential forum in Iowa in 2015.
In a column published after DeVos' nomination was announced, Brown lavished praise on DeVos. Brown called DeVos "tenacious in defending the best interests of children rather than interest groups and their political patrons." She described DeVos as "a born decision-maker, thick-skinned, never long discouraged by setbacks and impervious to hostile criticism."
After DeVos was nominated by Trump, The 74 began including a disclaimer on articles about DeVos, noting her role in funding the site. The disclaimer also said that Brown did not edit stories involving DeVos. That disclaimer, however, last appeared in 2017.
The 74's coverage of DeVos has been occasionally critical, but mostly laudatory. Headlines about DeVos' tenure as Education Secretary on The 74 include:
DeVos Proposed $50 Million for Districts to Decentralize Federal Money, to Put Schools in the Driver’s Seat. It’s a Smart Idea.
Teachers Nationwide Say Obama’s Discipline ‘Reform’ Put Them in Danger. So Why Are the Unions Fighting DeVos on Repeal?
Ivanka Trump, Betsy DeVos Tout STEM Education to 200 Students at Air & Space Museum
Resistance to DeVos Has Obscured the True Record of Michigan’s Strong Charter Schools
While DeVos has been excoriated by civil rights groups, including the NAACP, The 74 interviewed a civil rights leader who praised DeVos. In June, DeVos herself gave an exclusive interview to The 74. The interview, which did not mention DeVos' controversial policy moves on sexual assault and LGBTQ rights, did not include any disclosure of DeVos' prior funding for the site.
Brown's The 74 featured bigoted Daily Caller editor
While Brown served as editor-in-chief of The 74, the site featured at least 11 pieces from Eric Owens, an editor at The Daily Caller. Owens "has a long history of penning racially insensitive, sexist, and transphobic attacks on students and teachers."
Owens, for example, wrote in The Daily Caller that white privilege is a "radical and bizarre political theory that white people enjoy a bunch of wonderful privileges while everyone else suffers under the yoke of invisible oppression." In another Daily Caller column, Owens called college students "delicate, immature wusses who become traumatized, get the vapors and seek professional counseling any time they face adversity."
Owens is also obsessed with female teachers who sexually assault male students, repeatedly writing exploitative stories about the incidents.
After Brown joined Facebook, The Daily Caller was named an official Facebook fact-checking partner, despite The Daily Caller's history of inaccurate reporting.
Brown thinks Breitbart is a "quality" news source
Brown's role with The 74 raises further questions about the ideological underpinnings of Facebook's nascent news tab, which has not been rolled out to all users. Brown's team elected to include Breitbart — an unreliable and noxious right-wing site that was literally caught laundering white nationalist talking points — among the 200 "quality" sources included in the launch.
On Facebook, Brown defended the decision:
I also believe that in building out a destination for news on Facebook, we should include content from ideological publishers on both the left and the right - as long as that content meets our integrity standards for misinformation. All the content on Facebook News today meets those standards. If a publisher violates our standards by posting misinformation or hate speech on our platform, they will be removed from Facebook News.
It's unclear how Breitbart could meet any "integrity standard for misinformation." In 2017, for example, Breitbart "made up a false story that an immigrant started deadly Sonoma wildfires." The story, which was not backed by "any evidence," was picked up by other right-wing outlets like The Drudge Report and InfoWars, and spread quickly on Facebook. In 2016, Breitbart dispatched a reporter to a small Idaho town to report on a fake "Muslim invasion." It hawks scam cryptocurrencies to its readership.
Breitbart is banned from being cited as a source on Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia says Breitbart "should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts, due to its unreliability." Brown, however, believes it is a quality news source for Facebook readers.
Facebook has refused to release a list of the 200 publications approved for inclusion in the news tab.
Facebook's hostility toward Warren
The 74's hostility toward Warren echoes comments by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In leaked audio of a company meeting, Zuckerberg said it would "suck" if Warren became president because she posed an "existential" threat to the company. Zuckerberg promised to "go to the mat" to fight Warren's agenda. An excerpt:
I mean, if [Warren] gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.
After the audio leaked, Zuckerberg did not express regret for trashing one of the leading Democratic candidates for president in a company meeting. Instead, he linked to a transcript of the audio from his Facebook page, calling it an "unfiltered version of what I'm thinking and telling employees on a bunch of topics."
Zuckerberg has donated $600,000 to The 74 in 2019 through his foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Zuckerberg's foundation describes The 74 as "a non-profit, nonpartisan news site covering education in America."
In 2015, Brown co-founded The 74, which focuses on the public education system, and served as editor-in-chief. Even after joining Facebook in 2017, Brown has maintained an active role in The 74, where she is a member of the board of directors. According to documents filed with the IRS in 2017, Brown dedicated five hours per week — the equivalent of a month-and-a-half of full-time work — working for The 74.
That's the same amount of time Brown spent on The 74 prior to joining Facebook. (2017 is the most recent year that this information is publicly available.)
Beginning this fall, The 74 has harshly criticized presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. On October 23, The 74 published an article with this headline: "Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan Is Exactly What We Need — If Our Goal Is to Make the Achievement Gap Permanent." The piece described Warren's detailed education plan as "a cut-and-paste genuflect to the public relations departments of America’s national teachers unions." It goes on to claim that Warren is not a "straight shooter" and lacks a "moral center." The piece eventually dispenses with education policy altogether and launches into a diatribe of attacks on Warren:
She’s a millionaire who raves about socialism. She was Republican before she was a Democrat. She was for school choice before she was against it. She was for charter schools before she was against them. She was for standardized testing before she was against it.
She was Native American before she wasn’t.
This piece is not an aberration. An October 10 piece described Warren as "the second coming of Karl Marx."
An October 24 column accuses Warren of standing "against an institution designed to create opportunity for our nation’s children." Warren, according to the article, wants to "override… the clear preferences of the black and brown voters whom progressives claim to fight for."
An October 28 piece describes Warren as "another tired politician signing up to pledge undying loyalty to a system that is so clearly failing too many of our children." The column says Warren backs "the regressive status quo that leads our children into the school-to-prison pipeline."
Brown features her affiliation with The 74 on both her Facebook page and her Twitter profile.
Facebook did not answer a detailed set of questions about Brown's current duties at The 74 and whether there was a conflict with her work at Facebook. But the company sent Popular Information the following statement: "The 74 is not part of Facebook News. Campbell’s work with The 74 is well-known and she’s been transparent about her role with the nonprofit for many years.“
Campbell Brown's friend Betsy DeVos
Both Brown and The 74 are tightly linked to Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education. DeVos, who Brown calls a "friend," provided a two-year grant through her family foundation to help launch The 74. (The 74 has not disclosed the amount of DeVos' contribution.) Brown also served on the board of The American Federation for Children (AFC), a non-profit that DeVos founded and chaired.
The AFC is a right-wing organization that spends heavily to support Republicans at the state level. It spent millions, for example, to support former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) and his allies. The 74 and the AFC co-sponsored a Republican presidential forum in Iowa in 2015.
In a column published after DeVos' nomination was announced, Brown lavished praise on DeVos. Brown called DeVos "tenacious in defending the best interests of children rather than interest groups and their political patrons." She described DeVos as "a born decision-maker, thick-skinned, never long discouraged by setbacks and impervious to hostile criticism."
After DeVos was nominated by Trump, The 74 began including a disclaimer on articles about DeVos, noting her role in funding the site. The disclaimer also said that Brown did not edit stories involving DeVos. That disclaimer, however, last appeared in 2017.
The 74's coverage of DeVos has been occasionally critical, but mostly laudatory. Headlines about DeVos' tenure as Education Secretary on The 74 include:
DeVos Proposed $50 Million for Districts to Decentralize Federal Money, to Put Schools in the Driver’s Seat. It’s a Smart Idea.
Teachers Nationwide Say Obama’s Discipline ‘Reform’ Put Them in Danger. So Why Are the Unions Fighting DeVos on Repeal?
Ivanka Trump, Betsy DeVos Tout STEM Education to 200 Students at Air & Space Museum
Resistance to DeVos Has Obscured the True Record of Michigan’s Strong Charter Schools
While DeVos has been excoriated by civil rights groups, including the NAACP, The 74 interviewed a civil rights leader who praised DeVos. In June, DeVos herself gave an exclusive interview to The 74. The interview, which did not mention DeVos' controversial policy moves on sexual assault and LGBTQ rights, did not include any disclosure of DeVos' prior funding for the site.
Brown's The 74 featured bigoted Daily Caller editor
While Brown served as editor-in-chief of The 74, the site featured at least 11 pieces from Eric Owens, an editor at The Daily Caller. Owens "has a long history of penning racially insensitive, sexist, and transphobic attacks on students and teachers."
Owens, for example, wrote in The Daily Caller that white privilege is a "radical and bizarre political theory that white people enjoy a bunch of wonderful privileges while everyone else suffers under the yoke of invisible oppression." In another Daily Caller column, Owens called college students "delicate, immature wusses who become traumatized, get the vapors and seek professional counseling any time they face adversity."
Owens is also obsessed with female teachers who sexually assault male students, repeatedly writing exploitative stories about the incidents.
After Brown joined Facebook, The Daily Caller was named an official Facebook fact-checking partner, despite The Daily Caller's history of inaccurate reporting.
Brown thinks Breitbart is a "quality" news source
Brown's role with The 74 raises further questions about the ideological underpinnings of Facebook's nascent news tab, which has not been rolled out to all users. Brown's team elected to include Breitbart — an unreliable and noxious right-wing site that was literally caught laundering white nationalist talking points — among the 200 "quality" sources included in the launch.
On Facebook, Brown defended the decision:
I also believe that in building out a destination for news on Facebook, we should include content from ideological publishers on both the left and the right - as long as that content meets our integrity standards for misinformation. All the content on Facebook News today meets those standards. If a publisher violates our standards by posting misinformation or hate speech on our platform, they will be removed from Facebook News.
It's unclear how Breitbart could meet any "integrity standard for misinformation." In 2017, for example, Breitbart "made up a false story that an immigrant started deadly Sonoma wildfires." The story, which was not backed by "any evidence," was picked up by other right-wing outlets like The Drudge Report and InfoWars, and spread quickly on Facebook. In 2016, Breitbart dispatched a reporter to a small Idaho town to report on a fake "Muslim invasion." It hawks scam cryptocurrencies to its readership.
Breitbart is banned from being cited as a source on Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia says Breitbart "should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts, due to its unreliability." Brown, however, believes it is a quality news source for Facebook readers.
Facebook has refused to release a list of the 200 publications approved for inclusion in the news tab.
Facebook's hostility toward Warren
The 74's hostility toward Warren echoes comments by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In leaked audio of a company meeting, Zuckerberg said it would "suck" if Warren became president because she posed an "existential" threat to the company. Zuckerberg promised to "go to the mat" to fight Warren's agenda. An excerpt:
I mean, if [Warren] gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.
After the audio leaked, Zuckerberg did not express regret for trashing one of the leading Democratic candidates for president in a company meeting. Instead, he linked to a transcript of the audio from his Facebook page, calling it an "unfiltered version of what I'm thinking and telling employees on a bunch of topics."
Zuckerberg has donated $600,000 to The 74 in 2019 through his foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Zuckerberg's foundation describes The 74 as "a non-profit, nonpartisan news site covering education in America."
The Right-Wing Smear Artist Behind the Web’s Biggest Blacklist
BY Sam Bishop, Truthout
PUBLISHED November 7, 2019
Trevor Loudon might not be a name familiar to many in U.S. political circles. He certainly is no Steve Bannon or Roger Ailes, but the impact of his actions are felt just as hard as the actions of any other shadowy financier or strategist lurking behind the curtain of right-wing politics. Yet unlike the Koch brothers or Robert Mercer, if you’ve ever simply attended a political rally or merely mentioned your support for progressive policies online, you might already be on his radar and your personal information could already be published on his website.
The Making of Trevor Loudon
A decade ago, Loudon first made major headlines by publishing arguments for why he thought President-elect Barack Obama was secretly a communist. Though the evidence given against Obama was described by The Washington Post as “ranging from the absurd to the merely questionable,” that didn’t stop Loudon’s conspiracy theory from traveling like clockwork through the circuit of online message boards and Facebook groups until being picked up as a common slur against the president by the far-right radio show circuit. Being repeated by the likes of Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, it eventually gained enough traction to begin getting presented as fact on places like Fox News to millions of Americans.
At the time, you wouldn’t need to look further than the signs at a Tea Party rally to see the impact that Loudon’s accusation against the president had. Though this was the beginning of Loudon’s influence in the United States, the history of his work goes back much further.
It was in 1986 when Loudon first became involved in politics, establishing the Campaign for a Soviet-Free New Zealand. The group aimed to expose a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union secretly subverting the “New Zealand way of life” through a slew of shadowy puppet figures the Soviets controlled and ordered to do their bidding with the goal of turning the country into a communist dictatorship.
This fight to expose the Marxist “master plan” involved gathering information on anti-nuclear activists, Labour Party members, pastors from the National Council of Churches, anti-apartheid campaigners and Indigenous Māori community leaders — all of whom Loudon claimed were communist subversives which he exposed to his community of 800 followers through his newsletter, “New Zeal.” Other actions by the group included staging protests, handing out pamphlets and fighting to ban the import of Russian cars, which Loudon claimed were built through slave labor.
Before creating his group, Loudon’s life had a much more unusual purpose though.
Loudon’s Radicalization Through the Zenith Applied Philosophy
According to entries from his blog, he had previously spent at least six years studying as a student of the “Zenith Applied Philosophy.” This philosophy was created by combining the teachings of Scientology, aspects of Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of the right-wing John Birch Society.
The core idea behind the philosophy is that some people are born on “higher dimensional wavelengths,” and if those people pay the Zenith Applied Philosophy’s founder John Dalhoff between $860 to $1,900, he will give them a personality test. If someone passes this test, they could attend classes in which Dalhoff would preach about his supernatural powers (such as his ability to stop earthquakes) and warn about dangers of “communist space aliens” who secretly rule the world through their human disguise as Jewish bankers and who are out to get Dalhoff and his followers.
The group became a staple of the Christchurch, New Zealand, area throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Adherents would preach on the street while soliciting passersby with pamphlets and books that argued taxation was a form of government theft and that the U.S. civil rights movement had been controlled by the Soviet Union to usher in a New World Order.
Dalhoff charged upwards of $3,000 per class to teach the Zenith Applied Philosophy and reportedly drained the financial assets of many of his students while becoming a millionaire in the process. Unsurprisingly, this led to the philosophy and the organization behind it to be labeled publicly as a cult.
By 1990, the group’s membership had declined from hundreds of active members to only 20-30 of the most loyal followers — including Trevor Loudon. Despite its reputation, Loudon has in recent years passionately defended the philosophy, claiming he continues to study it and plans to keep doing so indefinitely.
Loudon’s Influence Crosses Continents
The rise of the internet found Loudon’s ideas being discovered and quickly embraced by U.S. conservatives in a way that wasn’t done by their New Zealand counterparts. From this exposure, Loudon ended up fast friends with Fox News host Glenn Beck, who used his platform to interview Loudon on numerous occasions. Around this time, Beck also often began repeating views or ideas that Loudon originally proposed, such as Obama secretly being a Marxist, and that top Obama advisers had connections with foreign powers like the Cuban government and the KGB.
As the U.S. began moving into the Obama era, Loudon became more strategic with his campaign to fight against communists, whom he believed were manufacturing the majority of the world’s drugs and infiltrating the world’s governments. That’s when he began work on a website known as KeyWiki.
With more than 120,000 articles, KeyWiki may currently be one of the largest repositories of political information on the entire internet. From posting the locations of elderly individuals who attended civil rights marches 60 years ago, to digging up every left-wing Facebook page liked by staffers for the Congressional Black Caucus, Loudon manages to maintain a mind-numbingly massive database of individuals involved in all manner of U.S. left-wing politics. It appears even simply liking posts on anti-Trump Facebook pages is enough to get your name leaked on the site and have information about you chronicled by its editors.
“We’ve got congressmen in there, peace activists, labor unionists, black radicals, religious socialists, greenies, left-wing academics, Obama appointees and thousands of card-carrying socialists and communists,” Loudon said in announcing the creation of the website. “In short, all the people who are dragging America down.”
Much of the process of gathering information on the site appears to be automated by bots and web-scraping software. One Reddit user described the actions of the wiki as follows:
A protest is organized on Facebook. It’s tagged #BLM or #FightFor15. People pledge to be there using their real names. Afterward, photos are posted and faces tagged, again with full, real names. News articles are shared and tagged the same. Key wiki searches for the popular left hashtags scrapes the data it finds, and creates profiles for every name mentioned in the articles and every face tagged in the photos, and builds a network of connections between activist circles based on who liked which posts and who is friends with whom.
Yet actually attending protests isn’t required for someone to be labeled among the website’s list of radicals and communist subversives, as many have discovered.
The Left Is Targeted on KeyWiki
James Hare found he had an entry on KeyWiki after he listed on LinkedIn that he had been hired by the New York branch of the German policy research group, The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He also discovered his page contained pictures of him which were screen-capped from YouTube videos he had appeared in.
Journalist Claire Downs found that she had a page on the site simply because she briefly joined a private feminist Facebook group which she wasn’t active on.
Downs also discovered that information against activists found on the site had already been weaponized by certain right-wing groups and was being disseminated on places like Reddit’s infamous forum dedicated to Donald Trump supporters called “r/The_Donald,” along with other various “men’s rights” groups.
Activist Olivia Katbi Smith is co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Portland, Oregon, chapter and has been profiled by KeyWiki. “One thing that creeps me out about it is that it lists who I’m married to and links to his page,” Smith told Truthout. “It has potential to be really damaging and threatening.”
Groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) often organize public community events that KeyWiki uses to target activists. Smith says she’s certain that attendance to these events are lower than they would be if KeyWiki hadn’t been created, as folks may be concerned that attending could lead to their personal phone numbers being leaked with pictures of them on a site that claims they are a communist — a practice known as “doxxing,” which KeyWiki has done before and which could lead to harassment.
Smith says that KeyWiki and other sites like it — such as Canary Mission, a database used to blacklist pro-Palestinian activists — have routinely created pages containing false information that has led to people losing their jobs and sense of personal safety. “The fear of being doxxed is real for all of us in DSA,” Smith said. “We try our best to have a culture of security and safety, but as a public-facing organization, it’s unfortunately one of the risks of being involved.”
One of the main problems with KeyWiki seems to be its lack of transparency. Unlike the normal Wikipedia, where anyone can edit and add content, the only way to correct misinformation on the site is by writing an appeal on the discussion pages of articles and hoping one of the currently 20 approved site members decides to change the page accordingly, which wouldn’t be much of an issue if misinformation wasn’t so commonplace on the site.
It’s not known how many people have actually been affected personally by the site, but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand the ramifications if an employer or family member searched someone’s name only to discover the first result on Google is a lengthy biography that includes private photos and personal information while labeling the person a “radical extremist.”
Meanwhile, in recent years, Loudon’s fame has only continued to grow. After publishing a number of books and documentaries which claim (among other things) that North Korea and Iran were responsible for anti-Trump protests, Loudon was invited in 2017 to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference on a panel moderated by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was also featured alongside legendary conservative figures such as former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese and conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly in a conservative video soon after that.
Despite the support from the right-wing establishment, it seems that KeyWiki is not enough to deter or prevent the rise of left-wing activism like Loudon was hoping for.
With political activism in the internet age only gaining momentum, perhaps websites like this are to be expected. As internet monitoring continues to become more commonplace, the lines between online accounts and real people’s lives will continue to blur.
Still, given the chilling loss of privacy and safety reported by those featured on the site, it’s clear that KeyWiki still remains a solitary example of the importance of online anonymity for activists, no matter how innocuous a person’s activism may be.
The Making of Trevor Loudon
A decade ago, Loudon first made major headlines by publishing arguments for why he thought President-elect Barack Obama was secretly a communist. Though the evidence given against Obama was described by The Washington Post as “ranging from the absurd to the merely questionable,” that didn’t stop Loudon’s conspiracy theory from traveling like clockwork through the circuit of online message boards and Facebook groups until being picked up as a common slur against the president by the far-right radio show circuit. Being repeated by the likes of Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, it eventually gained enough traction to begin getting presented as fact on places like Fox News to millions of Americans.
At the time, you wouldn’t need to look further than the signs at a Tea Party rally to see the impact that Loudon’s accusation against the president had. Though this was the beginning of Loudon’s influence in the United States, the history of his work goes back much further.
It was in 1986 when Loudon first became involved in politics, establishing the Campaign for a Soviet-Free New Zealand. The group aimed to expose a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union secretly subverting the “New Zealand way of life” through a slew of shadowy puppet figures the Soviets controlled and ordered to do their bidding with the goal of turning the country into a communist dictatorship.
This fight to expose the Marxist “master plan” involved gathering information on anti-nuclear activists, Labour Party members, pastors from the National Council of Churches, anti-apartheid campaigners and Indigenous Māori community leaders — all of whom Loudon claimed were communist subversives which he exposed to his community of 800 followers through his newsletter, “New Zeal.” Other actions by the group included staging protests, handing out pamphlets and fighting to ban the import of Russian cars, which Loudon claimed were built through slave labor.
Before creating his group, Loudon’s life had a much more unusual purpose though.
Loudon’s Radicalization Through the Zenith Applied Philosophy
According to entries from his blog, he had previously spent at least six years studying as a student of the “Zenith Applied Philosophy.” This philosophy was created by combining the teachings of Scientology, aspects of Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of the right-wing John Birch Society.
The core idea behind the philosophy is that some people are born on “higher dimensional wavelengths,” and if those people pay the Zenith Applied Philosophy’s founder John Dalhoff between $860 to $1,900, he will give them a personality test. If someone passes this test, they could attend classes in which Dalhoff would preach about his supernatural powers (such as his ability to stop earthquakes) and warn about dangers of “communist space aliens” who secretly rule the world through their human disguise as Jewish bankers and who are out to get Dalhoff and his followers.
The group became a staple of the Christchurch, New Zealand, area throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. Adherents would preach on the street while soliciting passersby with pamphlets and books that argued taxation was a form of government theft and that the U.S. civil rights movement had been controlled by the Soviet Union to usher in a New World Order.
Dalhoff charged upwards of $3,000 per class to teach the Zenith Applied Philosophy and reportedly drained the financial assets of many of his students while becoming a millionaire in the process. Unsurprisingly, this led to the philosophy and the organization behind it to be labeled publicly as a cult.
By 1990, the group’s membership had declined from hundreds of active members to only 20-30 of the most loyal followers — including Trevor Loudon. Despite its reputation, Loudon has in recent years passionately defended the philosophy, claiming he continues to study it and plans to keep doing so indefinitely.
Loudon’s Influence Crosses Continents
The rise of the internet found Loudon’s ideas being discovered and quickly embraced by U.S. conservatives in a way that wasn’t done by their New Zealand counterparts. From this exposure, Loudon ended up fast friends with Fox News host Glenn Beck, who used his platform to interview Loudon on numerous occasions. Around this time, Beck also often began repeating views or ideas that Loudon originally proposed, such as Obama secretly being a Marxist, and that top Obama advisers had connections with foreign powers like the Cuban government and the KGB.
As the U.S. began moving into the Obama era, Loudon became more strategic with his campaign to fight against communists, whom he believed were manufacturing the majority of the world’s drugs and infiltrating the world’s governments. That’s when he began work on a website known as KeyWiki.
With more than 120,000 articles, KeyWiki may currently be one of the largest repositories of political information on the entire internet. From posting the locations of elderly individuals who attended civil rights marches 60 years ago, to digging up every left-wing Facebook page liked by staffers for the Congressional Black Caucus, Loudon manages to maintain a mind-numbingly massive database of individuals involved in all manner of U.S. left-wing politics. It appears even simply liking posts on anti-Trump Facebook pages is enough to get your name leaked on the site and have information about you chronicled by its editors.
“We’ve got congressmen in there, peace activists, labor unionists, black radicals, religious socialists, greenies, left-wing academics, Obama appointees and thousands of card-carrying socialists and communists,” Loudon said in announcing the creation of the website. “In short, all the people who are dragging America down.”
Much of the process of gathering information on the site appears to be automated by bots and web-scraping software. One Reddit user described the actions of the wiki as follows:
A protest is organized on Facebook. It’s tagged #BLM or #FightFor15. People pledge to be there using their real names. Afterward, photos are posted and faces tagged, again with full, real names. News articles are shared and tagged the same. Key wiki searches for the popular left hashtags scrapes the data it finds, and creates profiles for every name mentioned in the articles and every face tagged in the photos, and builds a network of connections between activist circles based on who liked which posts and who is friends with whom.
Yet actually attending protests isn’t required for someone to be labeled among the website’s list of radicals and communist subversives, as many have discovered.
The Left Is Targeted on KeyWiki
James Hare found he had an entry on KeyWiki after he listed on LinkedIn that he had been hired by the New York branch of the German policy research group, The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He also discovered his page contained pictures of him which were screen-capped from YouTube videos he had appeared in.
Journalist Claire Downs found that she had a page on the site simply because she briefly joined a private feminist Facebook group which she wasn’t active on.
Downs also discovered that information against activists found on the site had already been weaponized by certain right-wing groups and was being disseminated on places like Reddit’s infamous forum dedicated to Donald Trump supporters called “r/The_Donald,” along with other various “men’s rights” groups.
Activist Olivia Katbi Smith is co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Portland, Oregon, chapter and has been profiled by KeyWiki. “One thing that creeps me out about it is that it lists who I’m married to and links to his page,” Smith told Truthout. “It has potential to be really damaging and threatening.”
Groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) often organize public community events that KeyWiki uses to target activists. Smith says she’s certain that attendance to these events are lower than they would be if KeyWiki hadn’t been created, as folks may be concerned that attending could lead to their personal phone numbers being leaked with pictures of them on a site that claims they are a communist — a practice known as “doxxing,” which KeyWiki has done before and which could lead to harassment.
Smith says that KeyWiki and other sites like it — such as Canary Mission, a database used to blacklist pro-Palestinian activists — have routinely created pages containing false information that has led to people losing their jobs and sense of personal safety. “The fear of being doxxed is real for all of us in DSA,” Smith said. “We try our best to have a culture of security and safety, but as a public-facing organization, it’s unfortunately one of the risks of being involved.”
One of the main problems with KeyWiki seems to be its lack of transparency. Unlike the normal Wikipedia, where anyone can edit and add content, the only way to correct misinformation on the site is by writing an appeal on the discussion pages of articles and hoping one of the currently 20 approved site members decides to change the page accordingly, which wouldn’t be much of an issue if misinformation wasn’t so commonplace on the site.
It’s not known how many people have actually been affected personally by the site, but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand the ramifications if an employer or family member searched someone’s name only to discover the first result on Google is a lengthy biography that includes private photos and personal information while labeling the person a “radical extremist.”
Meanwhile, in recent years, Loudon’s fame has only continued to grow. After publishing a number of books and documentaries which claim (among other things) that North Korea and Iran were responsible for anti-Trump protests, Loudon was invited in 2017 to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference on a panel moderated by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was also featured alongside legendary conservative figures such as former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese and conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly in a conservative video soon after that.
Despite the support from the right-wing establishment, it seems that KeyWiki is not enough to deter or prevent the rise of left-wing activism like Loudon was hoping for.
With political activism in the internet age only gaining momentum, perhaps websites like this are to be expected. As internet monitoring continues to become more commonplace, the lines between online accounts and real people’s lives will continue to blur.
Still, given the chilling loss of privacy and safety reported by those featured on the site, it’s clear that KeyWiki still remains a solitary example of the importance of online anonymity for activists, no matter how innocuous a person’s activism may be.
Facebook
How key Republicans inside Facebook are shifting its politics to the right
Company has been accused of pro-Republican bias, in both policy and personnel, amid fears it could be broken up if a Democrat wins in 2020
David Smith in Washington
the guardian
Sun 3 Nov 2019 02.00 EST
Facebook has been accused of pro-Republican bias, in both policy and personnel, amid fears at the company that it could be broken up if a Democrat wins the White House next year.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced fierce criticism this week, first for including Breitbart – once described by former chairman Steve Bannon as a “platform for the ‘alt-right’” – in its list of trusted sources for Facebook News, then for refusing to ban or factcheck political advertising.
Zuckerberg is also locked in a high-profile battle with the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading contender for the Democratic nomination in 2020 who has vowed to regulate big tech companies because they stifle competition and wield too much influence.
Although the social media giants are based in liberal California and often accused of anti-conservative bias, observers note that Facebook has recruited former Republican operatives in senior positions and is bound to put self-interest above anything else.
David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said: “Mark Zuckerberg continues to kowtow to the right and rightwing criticism. It began when he met with a bunch of rightwingers in May 2016 and then Facebook changed its algorithm policies and we saw a lot of fake news as a result.
“I think there’s a consistent pattern of Zuckerberg and the Breitbart issue is the most recent one where the right is able to make false claims of conservative bias on Facebook and then he bends over backwards to accommodate that criticism.”
Brock, a former conservative journalist turned Democratic operative, added: “I think there’s also the issue of a cluster of conservative Republican operatives who are running the policy shops at Facebook, which just compounds the problem. That you’ve got the major senior players all coming out of Republican politics is not great for the perception of fairness that Facebook should be trying to project.”
The Republican strain in Facebook was highlighted in a recent edition of the Popular Information newsletter, which stated that the top three leaders in the company’s Washington office are veteran party operatives. “Facebook’s DC office ensures that the company’s content policies meet the approval of Republicans in Congress,” Popular Information said.
Joel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy at Facebook, manages the company’s relationships with policymakers around the world. A former law clerk to archconservative justice Antonin Scalia on the supreme court, he served as deputy chief of staff for policy under former president George W Bush from 2006 to 2009, joining Facebook two years later.
Warren noted on Twitter this week: “Since he was hired, Facebook spent over $71 million on lobbying—nearly 100 times what it had spent before Kaplan joined.”
She added: “Facebook is now spending millions on lobbying amid antitrust scrutiny—and Kaplan is flexing his DC rolodex to help Mark Zuckerbeg [sic] wage a closed-door charm offensive with Republican lawmakers.”
In one telling incident last year, Kaplan sat behind Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault, during his bitterly divisive supreme court nomination hearing, prompting an angry backlash from Facebook staff. According to the New York Times, Kaplan wrote to them: “I want to apologize. I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one – internally and externally.”
Yet he still threw a celebratory party for Kavanaugh once he was confirmed.
Kaplan has reportedly advocated for rightwing sites such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller, which earlier this year became a partner in Facebook’s factchecking program. Founded by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller is pro-Trump, anti-immigrant and widely criticised for the way it reported on a fake nude photo of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Facebook’s Washington headquarters also includes Kevin Martin, vice-president of US public policy and former chairman, under Bush, of the Federal Communications Commission – where a congressional report said his “heavy-handed, opaque and non-collegial management style … created distrust, suspicion and turmoil”. He has forcefully spoken out against proposals to break up Facebook.
Katie Harbath, the company’s public policy director for global elections, led digital strategy for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. She has been the principal defender of the company’s decision to allow political adverts, even those including blatantly misleading claims, a move that earned a sharp rebuke from the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin among others and put it at odds with Twitter, which announced this week that it will refuse such ads.
Brock said: “I think Twitter did the right thing here and the only solution, really, is to do what Twitter did, but Facebook is in the opposing camp there.”
Facebook’s failure to filter out far-right hate speech and misinformation is a running controversy. Its decision to include Breitbart in its news tab’s algorithmic selections was widely condemned. In another report, Popular Information said it uncovered a network of 14 big Facebook pages that, violating the company’s rules, pretend to be independent but exclusively promote content from the conservative site the Daily Wire, which it described as “a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation”.
Several Democrats have raised the prospect of regulating Facebook, with Warren the most outspoken. The senator has said she would nominate regulators to unwind anti-competitive mergers such as its deals for WhatsApp and Instagram. Last month she mocked the Facebook’s failure to factcheck politicians by running ads containing the false claim that Zuckerberg is endorsing Trump’s re-election.
Warren’s ascent in the polls has set off alarm bells at Facebook. In a leaked audio recording last month, Zuckerberg could be heard telling employees: “But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Critics suggest that he therefore sees currying favor with Republicans who, for all their suspicion of big tech companies, are generally against regulation, as an act of self-preservation. There are fears that, four years after Trump exploited Facebook to get elected, the platform might again tilt in his favor.
Zuckerberg “has to be worried about what happens to Facebook if there’s a Democratic president”, Brock added. “I don’t think the answer to that is the way he’s behaving because all he’s doing is riling up Democratic opposition to Facebook policies, so I’m not sure what the logic is catering to the conservatives if he’s scared of Democratic regulation.”
But for the Facebook founder, who has reportedly held a series of meetings with Republican politicians and conservative commentators, it might be a case of be careful what you wish for. The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, wrote an opinion column for the Hill website in September entitled Free speech suppression online builds case to break up Big Tech. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator, is an outspoken critic of Silicon Valley.
Conversely, Facebook is hardly a political monolith. Hundreds of staff signed a letter to Zuckerberg and other leaders denouncing the decision to allow political ads containing falsehoods. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, told Vanity Fair’s New Establishment summit last month: “I imagine I will support a Democratic nominee. I have spoken for many years about my desire for my daughter and yours to see a woman as president.”
Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, argued that Zuckerberg and Sandberg are reckless “authoritarians” who helped get Jair Bolsonaro elected in Brazil and will do whatever it takes to preserve their power.
“I don’t see why Facebook book wouldn’t give Trump a massive, unlimited donation to get him re-elected. Who would even be able to find out whether they did that?”
But Stoller, author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, added: “I’m not saying that they are just for Republicans. I think that they are as likely to try to destroy Josh Hawley or to try to promote Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or other candidates they like as they are to help Trump.
“They’re authoritarians. They don’t care particularly about which party is in charge.”
Facebook’s Washington office did not respond to a request for comment.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced fierce criticism this week, first for including Breitbart – once described by former chairman Steve Bannon as a “platform for the ‘alt-right’” – in its list of trusted sources for Facebook News, then for refusing to ban or factcheck political advertising.
Zuckerberg is also locked in a high-profile battle with the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading contender for the Democratic nomination in 2020 who has vowed to regulate big tech companies because they stifle competition and wield too much influence.
Although the social media giants are based in liberal California and often accused of anti-conservative bias, observers note that Facebook has recruited former Republican operatives in senior positions and is bound to put self-interest above anything else.
David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said: “Mark Zuckerberg continues to kowtow to the right and rightwing criticism. It began when he met with a bunch of rightwingers in May 2016 and then Facebook changed its algorithm policies and we saw a lot of fake news as a result.
“I think there’s a consistent pattern of Zuckerberg and the Breitbart issue is the most recent one where the right is able to make false claims of conservative bias on Facebook and then he bends over backwards to accommodate that criticism.”
Brock, a former conservative journalist turned Democratic operative, added: “I think there’s also the issue of a cluster of conservative Republican operatives who are running the policy shops at Facebook, which just compounds the problem. That you’ve got the major senior players all coming out of Republican politics is not great for the perception of fairness that Facebook should be trying to project.”
The Republican strain in Facebook was highlighted in a recent edition of the Popular Information newsletter, which stated that the top three leaders in the company’s Washington office are veteran party operatives. “Facebook’s DC office ensures that the company’s content policies meet the approval of Republicans in Congress,” Popular Information said.
Joel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy at Facebook, manages the company’s relationships with policymakers around the world. A former law clerk to archconservative justice Antonin Scalia on the supreme court, he served as deputy chief of staff for policy under former president George W Bush from 2006 to 2009, joining Facebook two years later.
Warren noted on Twitter this week: “Since he was hired, Facebook spent over $71 million on lobbying—nearly 100 times what it had spent before Kaplan joined.”
She added: “Facebook is now spending millions on lobbying amid antitrust scrutiny—and Kaplan is flexing his DC rolodex to help Mark Zuckerbeg [sic] wage a closed-door charm offensive with Republican lawmakers.”
In one telling incident last year, Kaplan sat behind Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault, during his bitterly divisive supreme court nomination hearing, prompting an angry backlash from Facebook staff. According to the New York Times, Kaplan wrote to them: “I want to apologize. I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one – internally and externally.”
Yet he still threw a celebratory party for Kavanaugh once he was confirmed.
Kaplan has reportedly advocated for rightwing sites such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller, which earlier this year became a partner in Facebook’s factchecking program. Founded by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller is pro-Trump, anti-immigrant and widely criticised for the way it reported on a fake nude photo of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Facebook’s Washington headquarters also includes Kevin Martin, vice-president of US public policy and former chairman, under Bush, of the Federal Communications Commission – where a congressional report said his “heavy-handed, opaque and non-collegial management style … created distrust, suspicion and turmoil”. He has forcefully spoken out against proposals to break up Facebook.
Katie Harbath, the company’s public policy director for global elections, led digital strategy for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. She has been the principal defender of the company’s decision to allow political adverts, even those including blatantly misleading claims, a move that earned a sharp rebuke from the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin among others and put it at odds with Twitter, which announced this week that it will refuse such ads.
Brock said: “I think Twitter did the right thing here and the only solution, really, is to do what Twitter did, but Facebook is in the opposing camp there.”
Facebook’s failure to filter out far-right hate speech and misinformation is a running controversy. Its decision to include Breitbart in its news tab’s algorithmic selections was widely condemned. In another report, Popular Information said it uncovered a network of 14 big Facebook pages that, violating the company’s rules, pretend to be independent but exclusively promote content from the conservative site the Daily Wire, which it described as “a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation”.
Several Democrats have raised the prospect of regulating Facebook, with Warren the most outspoken. The senator has said she would nominate regulators to unwind anti-competitive mergers such as its deals for WhatsApp and Instagram. Last month she mocked the Facebook’s failure to factcheck politicians by running ads containing the false claim that Zuckerberg is endorsing Trump’s re-election.
Warren’s ascent in the polls has set off alarm bells at Facebook. In a leaked audio recording last month, Zuckerberg could be heard telling employees: “But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Critics suggest that he therefore sees currying favor with Republicans who, for all their suspicion of big tech companies, are generally against regulation, as an act of self-preservation. There are fears that, four years after Trump exploited Facebook to get elected, the platform might again tilt in his favor.
Zuckerberg “has to be worried about what happens to Facebook if there’s a Democratic president”, Brock added. “I don’t think the answer to that is the way he’s behaving because all he’s doing is riling up Democratic opposition to Facebook policies, so I’m not sure what the logic is catering to the conservatives if he’s scared of Democratic regulation.”
But for the Facebook founder, who has reportedly held a series of meetings with Republican politicians and conservative commentators, it might be a case of be careful what you wish for. The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, wrote an opinion column for the Hill website in September entitled Free speech suppression online builds case to break up Big Tech. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator, is an outspoken critic of Silicon Valley.
Conversely, Facebook is hardly a political monolith. Hundreds of staff signed a letter to Zuckerberg and other leaders denouncing the decision to allow political ads containing falsehoods. Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, told Vanity Fair’s New Establishment summit last month: “I imagine I will support a Democratic nominee. I have spoken for many years about my desire for my daughter and yours to see a woman as president.”
Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, argued that Zuckerberg and Sandberg are reckless “authoritarians” who helped get Jair Bolsonaro elected in Brazil and will do whatever it takes to preserve their power.
“I don’t see why Facebook book wouldn’t give Trump a massive, unlimited donation to get him re-elected. Who would even be able to find out whether they did that?”
But Stoller, author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, added: “I’m not saying that they are just for Republicans. I think that they are as likely to try to destroy Josh Hawley or to try to promote Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or other candidates they like as they are to help Trump.
“They’re authoritarians. They don’t care particularly about which party is in charge.”
Facebook’s Washington office did not respond to a request for comment.
Facebook agrees to pay fine over Cambridge Analytica scandal
Company withdraws appeal against £500,000 penalty imposed by UK data watchdog
Alex Hern
the guardian
Wed 30 Oct 2019 06.36 EDT
Facebook has agreed to pay a £500,000 fine, the highest possible, to the Information Commissioner’s Office over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ending more than a year of litigation between the regulator and social network.
The ICO announced its intention to fine Facebook in July 2018. Unusually, the office went public with its intention before giving Facebook a chance to respond, and ultimately issued the official penalty notice three months later, in October. Facebook appealed against the fine, and in June 2019 the tribunal issued an interim decision “holding that procedural fairness and allegations of bias on the part of the ICO should be considered as part of the appeal, and that the ICO should be required to disclose materials relating to its decision-making process”.
Under the terms of the settlement, Facebook has made no admission of liability. The company has also been allowed to retain the documents disclosed by the ICO, in part because they may help it in its own investigation into the issues around Cambridge Analytica. That investigation had been paused at the ICO’s request.
Since Cambridge Analytica’s data protection violations occurred in 2015, before the implementation of the EU’s general data protection regulation in 2018, the maximum possible fine the ICO could levy was £500,000. If the offences had occurred after May 2018, the potential fine could have been much higher – up to 4% of Facebook’s annual turnover.
James Dipple-Johnstone, the ICO’s deputy commissioner, said: “The ICO welcomes the agreement reached with Facebook for the withdrawal of their appeal against our monetary penalty notice and agreement to pay the fine. The ICO’s main concern was that UK citizen data was exposed to a serious risk of harm.
“Protection of personal information and personal privacy is of fundamental importance, not only for the rights of individuals, but also as we now know, for the preservation of a strong democracy. We are pleased to hear that Facebook has taken, and will continue to take, significant steps to comply with the fundamental principles of data protection. With this strong commitment to protecting people’s personal information and privacy, we expect that Facebook will be able to move forward and learn from the events of this case.”
Harry Kinmonth, a lawyer representing Facebook, said: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the ICO. As we have said before, we wish we had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. We made major changes to our platform back then, significantly restricting the information which app developers could access. Protecting people’s information and privacy is a top priority for Facebook, and we are continuing to build new controls to help people protect and manage their information.
“The ICO has stated that it has not discovered evidence that the data of Facebook users in the EU was transferred to Cambridge Analytica by Dr [Aleksandr] Kogan. However, we look forward to continuing to cooperate with the ICO’s wider and ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes.”
The ICO announced its intention to fine Facebook in July 2018. Unusually, the office went public with its intention before giving Facebook a chance to respond, and ultimately issued the official penalty notice three months later, in October. Facebook appealed against the fine, and in June 2019 the tribunal issued an interim decision “holding that procedural fairness and allegations of bias on the part of the ICO should be considered as part of the appeal, and that the ICO should be required to disclose materials relating to its decision-making process”.
Under the terms of the settlement, Facebook has made no admission of liability. The company has also been allowed to retain the documents disclosed by the ICO, in part because they may help it in its own investigation into the issues around Cambridge Analytica. That investigation had been paused at the ICO’s request.
Since Cambridge Analytica’s data protection violations occurred in 2015, before the implementation of the EU’s general data protection regulation in 2018, the maximum possible fine the ICO could levy was £500,000. If the offences had occurred after May 2018, the potential fine could have been much higher – up to 4% of Facebook’s annual turnover.
James Dipple-Johnstone, the ICO’s deputy commissioner, said: “The ICO welcomes the agreement reached with Facebook for the withdrawal of their appeal against our monetary penalty notice and agreement to pay the fine. The ICO’s main concern was that UK citizen data was exposed to a serious risk of harm.
“Protection of personal information and personal privacy is of fundamental importance, not only for the rights of individuals, but also as we now know, for the preservation of a strong democracy. We are pleased to hear that Facebook has taken, and will continue to take, significant steps to comply with the fundamental principles of data protection. With this strong commitment to protecting people’s personal information and privacy, we expect that Facebook will be able to move forward and learn from the events of this case.”
Harry Kinmonth, a lawyer representing Facebook, said: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the ICO. As we have said before, we wish we had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. We made major changes to our platform back then, significantly restricting the information which app developers could access. Protecting people’s information and privacy is a top priority for Facebook, and we are continuing to build new controls to help people protect and manage their information.
“The ICO has stated that it has not discovered evidence that the data of Facebook users in the EU was transferred to Cambridge Analytica by Dr [Aleksandr] Kogan. However, we look forward to continuing to cooperate with the ICO’s wider and ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes.”
Facebook Axed Pro-Vaccine Ads, Let Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracies Slip Through
Legitimate health institutions are getting swept up in Facebook’s algorithmic crackdown against anti-vaccine misinformation.
Blake Montgomery - DAILY BEAST
Updated 10.25.19 3:33PM ET
Facebook promised to institute a stricter policy on anti-vaccination misinformation in ads back in February, a policy it expanded sitewide in March. That crackdown, however, appears to be penalizing some legitimate healthcare providers while letting some anti-vaccine conspiracies slide, even as the United States faces its largest outbreak of diseases preventable by vaccines in decades.
This month, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, the state’s official health department, bought 14 ads to promote a statewide program providing free pediatric vaccinations. Facebook removed all of them.
During the same time period, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit founded and chaired by the nation’s most prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., successfully placed more than 10 ads stoking unfounded fear about vaccines and other medical conspiracy theories. Some of the ads skirted around their intent, and some did not: one promised to reveal the truth about the “MMR Vaccine’s Poison Pill”—the commonplace vaccine against mumps, measles, and rubella. It reached between 10,000 and 50,000 people, and Facebook took in between $100 and $500 for the ad.
Another page promoted a link to a website called vaccineholocaust.org without issue in June. The group Michigan for Vaccine Choice, which advocates for exemptions from mandatory vaccines, is still running an ad that began mid-July. All of the ads draw ideas from a debunked web of conspiracy theories arguing that vaccines pose hidden dangers and the risk of “vaccine injury” means children should be denied potentially life-saving immunizations.
The Minnesota Hospital Association, which lobbies the Minnesota legislature on behalf of the state’s hospitals, buys Facebook ads to fight vaccine disinformation and promote conversations with healthcare providers about vaccines. Over the last two months, Facebook has removed dozens of their ads. Facebook flags the group’s advertisements referencing vaccines far more often than any of its other ad campaigns, which cover medical issues like mental illness, addiction, and vaping-related illnesses.
“It’s our understanding that auto-blocking software flagged these ads, since the text resembles when ads appear to be spreading vaccine misinformation,” said Emily Lowther, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Hospital Association, who expressed frustration at the phenomenon.
Lowther said the association’s advertising agency reuploaded the vaccination campaign ads and requested secondary reviews, prompting a human Facebook moderator to determine if a campaign abides by the social network’s rules. Facebook accepted the ads after the second review, but only after human oversight overruled the algorithmic mistake, according to Lowther. A Facebook spokesperson described the ads as “incorrectly rejected,” noting that the platform overturned the initial determination.
Lowther described Facebook’s approach to ad moderation as fickle and inconsistent.
“It’s a moving mark what’s going to make it up and what’s going to get flagged. The systems they have in place are constantly changing. We often expect we’ll have to reupload ads,” she said.
Archived ads in Facebook’s Ad Library reveal an unpredictable approach to moderation. The social network blocked one Minnesota Hospitals ad that read, “MYTH: Vaccines will infect me with the disease I am trying to prevent” but allowed another with similar text: “MYTH: Vaccines cause autism.” Both led to the same webpage, which advised visitors to talk to their doctors about vaccinations.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society bought an ad in June to spread a campaign debunking common anti-vaccination talking points. It featured a link with the text “#vaccineswork.” Facebook took it down. A spokesperson said that removal was a mistake and that it was overturned after an inquiry from The Daily Beast. The Society did not respond to a request for comment.
Online anti-vaccine misinformation is an outgrowth of a real world public health threat: the World Health Organization identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the most significant dangers to global health in 2019. Due to swelling anti-vaccine sentiment, the U.S. may lose its designation as a nation that has eliminated measles.
Though the communities that oppose vaccines tend to be tight-knit and insular, Facebook ads allow them to extend their reach and target the people most susceptible to their message. A Daily Beast report published in February found ads targeting young women with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that were viewed millions of times. Despite the company’s efforts, Facebook features like crowdfunding and private groups continue to fuel the fire of anti-vaccine sentiment both on and offline.
Anti-vaxxers are pushing back against Facebook through grassroots ad campaigns and at the highest levels of power. Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) lambasted CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Congressional hearing Wednesday for removing anti-vaccine content. Zuckerberg cited scientific consensus on the topic, but Posey claimed the social network was silencing views unpalatable to its chief executive.
“If you look at the statistics, I think you’re making a bad mistake,” Posey warned.
This month, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, the state’s official health department, bought 14 ads to promote a statewide program providing free pediatric vaccinations. Facebook removed all of them.
During the same time period, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit founded and chaired by the nation’s most prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., successfully placed more than 10 ads stoking unfounded fear about vaccines and other medical conspiracy theories. Some of the ads skirted around their intent, and some did not: one promised to reveal the truth about the “MMR Vaccine’s Poison Pill”—the commonplace vaccine against mumps, measles, and rubella. It reached between 10,000 and 50,000 people, and Facebook took in between $100 and $500 for the ad.
Another page promoted a link to a website called vaccineholocaust.org without issue in June. The group Michigan for Vaccine Choice, which advocates for exemptions from mandatory vaccines, is still running an ad that began mid-July. All of the ads draw ideas from a debunked web of conspiracy theories arguing that vaccines pose hidden dangers and the risk of “vaccine injury” means children should be denied potentially life-saving immunizations.
The Minnesota Hospital Association, which lobbies the Minnesota legislature on behalf of the state’s hospitals, buys Facebook ads to fight vaccine disinformation and promote conversations with healthcare providers about vaccines. Over the last two months, Facebook has removed dozens of their ads. Facebook flags the group’s advertisements referencing vaccines far more often than any of its other ad campaigns, which cover medical issues like mental illness, addiction, and vaping-related illnesses.
“It’s our understanding that auto-blocking software flagged these ads, since the text resembles when ads appear to be spreading vaccine misinformation,” said Emily Lowther, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Hospital Association, who expressed frustration at the phenomenon.
Lowther said the association’s advertising agency reuploaded the vaccination campaign ads and requested secondary reviews, prompting a human Facebook moderator to determine if a campaign abides by the social network’s rules. Facebook accepted the ads after the second review, but only after human oversight overruled the algorithmic mistake, according to Lowther. A Facebook spokesperson described the ads as “incorrectly rejected,” noting that the platform overturned the initial determination.
Lowther described Facebook’s approach to ad moderation as fickle and inconsistent.
“It’s a moving mark what’s going to make it up and what’s going to get flagged. The systems they have in place are constantly changing. We often expect we’ll have to reupload ads,” she said.
Archived ads in Facebook’s Ad Library reveal an unpredictable approach to moderation. The social network blocked one Minnesota Hospitals ad that read, “MYTH: Vaccines will infect me with the disease I am trying to prevent” but allowed another with similar text: “MYTH: Vaccines cause autism.” Both led to the same webpage, which advised visitors to talk to their doctors about vaccinations.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society bought an ad in June to spread a campaign debunking common anti-vaccination talking points. It featured a link with the text “#vaccineswork.” Facebook took it down. A spokesperson said that removal was a mistake and that it was overturned after an inquiry from The Daily Beast. The Society did not respond to a request for comment.
Online anti-vaccine misinformation is an outgrowth of a real world public health threat: the World Health Organization identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the most significant dangers to global health in 2019. Due to swelling anti-vaccine sentiment, the U.S. may lose its designation as a nation that has eliminated measles.
Though the communities that oppose vaccines tend to be tight-knit and insular, Facebook ads allow them to extend their reach and target the people most susceptible to their message. A Daily Beast report published in February found ads targeting young women with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that were viewed millions of times. Despite the company’s efforts, Facebook features like crowdfunding and private groups continue to fuel the fire of anti-vaccine sentiment both on and offline.
Anti-vaxxers are pushing back against Facebook through grassroots ad campaigns and at the highest levels of power. Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) lambasted CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Congressional hearing Wednesday for removing anti-vaccine content. Zuckerberg cited scientific consensus on the topic, but Posey claimed the social network was silencing views unpalatable to its chief executive.
“If you look at the statistics, I think you’re making a bad mistake,” Posey warned.
Russian Trolls Are Gearing Up For 2020, And Fake News Sites Are Everywhere
Elevating these sites, along with tweets, Instagram messages, Facebook pages, and other social media drenched in propaganda, is the mission of the stacks of new troll accounts.
By Mark Sumner - crooks & liars
10/24/19 3:49am
During the 2016 election cycle, a large part of the Russian propaganda effort was aimed at spreading false stories on a number of fronts. One of these was the creation of websites that looked like they were those of local U.S. news organizations, and sometimes even contained many actual news stories, but also contained conspiracy theories or simple lies hiding among the real news. Those sites are once again appearing in large numbers. Meanwhile, social media is seeing a sharp spike in new accounts as troll farms crank out large numbers of false identities to cite the false stories posted by these false news outlets. 2020 is already looking a lot like 2016 … except worse.
As the Lansing State Journal reports, the not-actual-news sites are popping up all over Michigan. Nearly 40 sites have appeared in recent days with titles like the Ann Arbor Times and the UP Gazette. Each of these sites includes some local news, often lifted from real news sites in the area. But they’re also heavily saturated with political messaging. The growing number of sites, and the duplication of articles found on real news outlets, means that readers searching for a story can often end up on the fake site rather than the original source—especially when bots and trolls have boosted the apparent importance of the false site by creating frequent links and click-throughs.
Not surprisingly, these proliferating sites have a “conservative” bent and include not just national stories, but also stories targeting local representatives and state officials. That includes some stories that are strongly slanted and others that are simply made up from whole cloth, such as claims that the state government is sitting on an unspent mountain of highway money while the infrastructure crumbles.
Elevating these sites, along with tweets, Instagram messages, Facebook pages, and other social media drenched in propaganda, is the mission of the stacks of new troll accounts noted by CNN Business. Prominent in the efforts so far is a group of Instagram accounts that are designed to look like they belong to people from different states with different backgrounds and political leanings who share just one common trait: a strong dislike for Joe Biden. The type of memes and statements being spread by these accounts are identical to the sorts of comments used in 2016 to build up a deep animosity toward Hillary Clinton and shape the idea that she had done … something crooked, even if no one was quite sure what it was.
Another similarity with the troll activity in 2016 is the use of race in messaging. Black communities were the largest target of Russian propaganda in the 2016 campaign, with the goal of reducing enthusiasm for Clinton and harming voter turnout. That same pattern is already visible in what’s appearing for 2020.
Those fake Instagram accounts supposedly represent groups called things like @michigan_black_community and similar names meant to make it seem that they are supported by activists within the African American community. Those accounts agree on a lot of things, including opposition to Trump, but they also make frequent attacks on Biden, uniting around the idea that if he is the candidate, black voters should sit out the election.
A similar effort has been extended to other groups in 2020. There are feminists … against Biden, LGBTQ rights advocates … against Biden, and environmentalists … against Biden. There are also accounts in the mix hoping to mine divisions among supporters of various Democratic candidates, such as accounts pretending to be Bernie voters who will go for Trump or stay home if Biden wins the nomination.
The early focus on Biden doesn’t mean that these accounts can’t make a sudden and miraculous switch in their hate-direction. Should Sanders or Elizabeth Warren do well in early voting, all of these groups can be expected to become “anyone but fill-in-the-name-of-leading-candidate-here” fans.
It would be nice to think that, four years on, Americans would recognize the signs of these often-automated hate-driven accounts. However, not only are the new accounts springing up by the thousands, but they’re already scoring eyeballs. Facebook reports at least 250,000 followers of accounts identified as Russian trolls.
And as this is happening, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell once again on Wednesday blocked a Senate vote on a bill to improve election security. It’s Russian troll season again, and the Republicans are welcoming them with open arms and a weakened election system.
As the Lansing State Journal reports, the not-actual-news sites are popping up all over Michigan. Nearly 40 sites have appeared in recent days with titles like the Ann Arbor Times and the UP Gazette. Each of these sites includes some local news, often lifted from real news sites in the area. But they’re also heavily saturated with political messaging. The growing number of sites, and the duplication of articles found on real news outlets, means that readers searching for a story can often end up on the fake site rather than the original source—especially when bots and trolls have boosted the apparent importance of the false site by creating frequent links and click-throughs.
Not surprisingly, these proliferating sites have a “conservative” bent and include not just national stories, but also stories targeting local representatives and state officials. That includes some stories that are strongly slanted and others that are simply made up from whole cloth, such as claims that the state government is sitting on an unspent mountain of highway money while the infrastructure crumbles.
Elevating these sites, along with tweets, Instagram messages, Facebook pages, and other social media drenched in propaganda, is the mission of the stacks of new troll accounts noted by CNN Business. Prominent in the efforts so far is a group of Instagram accounts that are designed to look like they belong to people from different states with different backgrounds and political leanings who share just one common trait: a strong dislike for Joe Biden. The type of memes and statements being spread by these accounts are identical to the sorts of comments used in 2016 to build up a deep animosity toward Hillary Clinton and shape the idea that she had done … something crooked, even if no one was quite sure what it was.
Another similarity with the troll activity in 2016 is the use of race in messaging. Black communities were the largest target of Russian propaganda in the 2016 campaign, with the goal of reducing enthusiasm for Clinton and harming voter turnout. That same pattern is already visible in what’s appearing for 2020.
Those fake Instagram accounts supposedly represent groups called things like @michigan_black_community and similar names meant to make it seem that they are supported by activists within the African American community. Those accounts agree on a lot of things, including opposition to Trump, but they also make frequent attacks on Biden, uniting around the idea that if he is the candidate, black voters should sit out the election.
A similar effort has been extended to other groups in 2020. There are feminists … against Biden, LGBTQ rights advocates … against Biden, and environmentalists … against Biden. There are also accounts in the mix hoping to mine divisions among supporters of various Democratic candidates, such as accounts pretending to be Bernie voters who will go for Trump or stay home if Biden wins the nomination.
The early focus on Biden doesn’t mean that these accounts can’t make a sudden and miraculous switch in their hate-direction. Should Sanders or Elizabeth Warren do well in early voting, all of these groups can be expected to become “anyone but fill-in-the-name-of-leading-candidate-here” fans.
It would be nice to think that, four years on, Americans would recognize the signs of these often-automated hate-driven accounts. However, not only are the new accounts springing up by the thousands, but they’re already scoring eyeballs. Facebook reports at least 250,000 followers of accounts identified as Russian trolls.
And as this is happening, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell once again on Wednesday blocked a Senate vote on a bill to improve election security. It’s Russian troll season again, and the Republicans are welcoming them with open arms and a weakened election system.
Facebook’s rationale for allowing lies in political ads makes no sense
Facebook says one's ads cannot spread falsehoods, unless you're among a specific subset of politicians. Wait, what?
NICOLE KARLIS - salon
OCTOBER 16, 2019 10:59PM (UTC)
The hashtag #DeleteFacebook is trending again, and for more than merely one scandal. Besides being in the news for a small legal fine that the social media megalith was slapped with after its falsified video data undermined numerous news media outlets, the company's recently-clarified advertising policy reveal a strange double-standard that gives prominent politicians carte blanche to spread falsehoods on the platform.
As presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) illustrated by example last week, the social media company won’t remove political ads on its platform that blatantly spread misinformation — despite touting a fact-checking system it put in place after the 2016 presidential election. Warren’s campaign published an ad last week in which she joked that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Trump.
The ad read:
"Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.
"You're probably shocked, and you might be thinking, 'how could this possibly be true?' Well, it's not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform--and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters."
The ad was an effective way to raise awareness about Facebook's refusal to verify political ads on its platform. Warren’s ad was allowed because of a Facebook policy that allows politicians to lie in political advertising. The policy came to light in a post by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, who explained in a speech last month that the decision is “grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression and respect for the democratic process.”
“We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos,” Clegg said. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”
Clegg continued:
We have had this policy on the books for over a year now, posted publicly on our site under our eligibility guidelines. This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review. However, when a politician shares previously debunked content including links, videos and photos, we plan to demote that content, display related information from fact-checkers, and reject its inclusion in advertisements. You can find more about the third-party fact-checking program and content eligibility here.
Yet this policy that is meant to determine which political ads stay and which ones are deleted appears to be on precarious philosophical footing. As BuzzFeed News reported yesterday, the company is haphazardly enforcing other advertising policies, which have resulted in paid content from at least five U.S. presidential candidates to be removed. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News none of the rejected ads were rejected because they were deemed false by their fact-checkers; rather, they were removed for violating one or more of Facebook's other advertising policies, like using fake buttons in ads or profanity.
While prevaricating isn’t exactly a new thing for political campaigns, social media allows false claims to go viral, unimpeded, in a matter of seconds. It also provides the capability for those ads to reach millions of people around the world instantaneously. This puts Facebook in a precarious position, and seems to contradict its previous vows to stop misinformation from spreading on its platform.
Indeed, Facebook haphazardly enforces its own misinformation policies because it has taken a haphazard stance on misinformation. For example, regarding the anti-vaccination "movement", which poses a vast risk to public health, Facebook says it won’t tolerate such misinformation. "If a group or Page admin posts this vaccine misinformation, we will exclude the entire group or Page from recommendations, reduce these groups and Pages' distribution in News Feed and Search, and reject ads with this misinformation," Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management, said in a statement.
But what if a politician was spreading misinformation about vaccinations? Facebook says it is not their responsibility to intervene when politicians speak, which in essence excuses them from responsibility if a Trump-like politician actively spreads misinformation. In turn, the public thus holds all the responsibility to discern fact from fiction. Facebook's hypocritical stance is unsurprising — and in turn, so is the public choice to opt to delete the platform altogether, as much of the public has.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is preparing to address the company's latest criticisms in a speech tomorrow. Per his own Facebook post, he has been preparing a speech about his “views on voice and free expression.”
“It's the most comprehensive take I've written about my views, why I believe voice is important, how giving people voice and bringing people together go hand in hand, how we might address the challenges that more voice and the internet introduce, and the major threats to free expression around the world,” he said. “I spent a lot of time working on this, and it's an unfiltered take on how I think about these questions.”
As presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) illustrated by example last week, the social media company won’t remove political ads on its platform that blatantly spread misinformation — despite touting a fact-checking system it put in place after the 2016 presidential election. Warren’s campaign published an ad last week in which she joked that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Trump.
The ad read:
"Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.
"You're probably shocked, and you might be thinking, 'how could this possibly be true?' Well, it's not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform--and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters."
The ad was an effective way to raise awareness about Facebook's refusal to verify political ads on its platform. Warren’s ad was allowed because of a Facebook policy that allows politicians to lie in political advertising. The policy came to light in a post by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, who explained in a speech last month that the decision is “grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression and respect for the democratic process.”
“We rely on third-party fact-checkers to help reduce the spread of false news and other types of viral misinformation, like memes or manipulated photos and videos,” Clegg said. “We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”
Clegg continued:
We have had this policy on the books for over a year now, posted publicly on our site under our eligibility guidelines. This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review. However, when a politician shares previously debunked content including links, videos and photos, we plan to demote that content, display related information from fact-checkers, and reject its inclusion in advertisements. You can find more about the third-party fact-checking program and content eligibility here.
Yet this policy that is meant to determine which political ads stay and which ones are deleted appears to be on precarious philosophical footing. As BuzzFeed News reported yesterday, the company is haphazardly enforcing other advertising policies, which have resulted in paid content from at least five U.S. presidential candidates to be removed. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News none of the rejected ads were rejected because they were deemed false by their fact-checkers; rather, they were removed for violating one or more of Facebook's other advertising policies, like using fake buttons in ads or profanity.
While prevaricating isn’t exactly a new thing for political campaigns, social media allows false claims to go viral, unimpeded, in a matter of seconds. It also provides the capability for those ads to reach millions of people around the world instantaneously. This puts Facebook in a precarious position, and seems to contradict its previous vows to stop misinformation from spreading on its platform.
Indeed, Facebook haphazardly enforces its own misinformation policies because it has taken a haphazard stance on misinformation. For example, regarding the anti-vaccination "movement", which poses a vast risk to public health, Facebook says it won’t tolerate such misinformation. "If a group or Page admin posts this vaccine misinformation, we will exclude the entire group or Page from recommendations, reduce these groups and Pages' distribution in News Feed and Search, and reject ads with this misinformation," Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management, said in a statement.
But what if a politician was spreading misinformation about vaccinations? Facebook says it is not their responsibility to intervene when politicians speak, which in essence excuses them from responsibility if a Trump-like politician actively spreads misinformation. In turn, the public thus holds all the responsibility to discern fact from fiction. Facebook's hypocritical stance is unsurprising — and in turn, so is the public choice to opt to delete the platform altogether, as much of the public has.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is preparing to address the company's latest criticisms in a speech tomorrow. Per his own Facebook post, he has been preparing a speech about his “views on voice and free expression.”
“It's the most comprehensive take I've written about my views, why I believe voice is important, how giving people voice and bringing people together go hand in hand, how we might address the challenges that more voice and the internet introduce, and the major threats to free expression around the world,” he said. “I spent a lot of time working on this, and it's an unfiltered take on how I think about these questions.”
another fool uncovered!!!
OANN anchor goes down in flames for reporting Christopher Columbus saved natives with Christianity
October 15, 2019
By David Edwards - raw story
One America News Network anchor Liz Wheeler took on history this week when she suggested that Christopher Columbus actually ended atrocities against Native Americans by bringing Christianity to America.
In a series of eye-popping tweets on Monday, Wheeler decided to celebrate Columbus Day by whitewashing the explorer’s legacy.
“Christopher Columbus didn’t commit genocide,” she wrote. “Within 200 years of Columbus’s arrival, 95% of the 20M Native Americans died… from disease. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, cholera.”
“Tragic, definitely. But mass murder by Columbus? Not even close,” Wheeler added.
She followed up with a second tweet: “In fact, mass murder, genocide, slavery, war, conquest, child sacrifice WAS happening in America… before Columbus. At the hands of Native tribes. It could be argued because of the Christian influence Columbus brought to America that those atrocities ended. Happy Columbus Day.”
Liz Wheeler✔
@Liz_Wheeler
Christopher Columbus didn't commit genocide.
Within 200 years of Columbus's arrival, 95% of the 20M Native Americans died... from disease. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, cholera.
Tragic, definitely. But mass murder by Columbus? Not even close.
4:12 PM - Oct 14, 2019
Andrew Kimmel, BuzzFeed’s former head of live video quickly knocked down Wheeler’s assertions.
“His own journals prove otherwise,” Kimmel fired back on Twitter. “Why must you lie about everything?”
Wheeler then dared Kimmel to show her the evidence.
“Do some journalism,” Kimmel replied with a few hints for Wheeler.
In 2015, Vox came up with 9 reasons “Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.”
In a series of eye-popping tweets on Monday, Wheeler decided to celebrate Columbus Day by whitewashing the explorer’s legacy.
“Christopher Columbus didn’t commit genocide,” she wrote. “Within 200 years of Columbus’s arrival, 95% of the 20M Native Americans died… from disease. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, cholera.”
“Tragic, definitely. But mass murder by Columbus? Not even close,” Wheeler added.
She followed up with a second tweet: “In fact, mass murder, genocide, slavery, war, conquest, child sacrifice WAS happening in America… before Columbus. At the hands of Native tribes. It could be argued because of the Christian influence Columbus brought to America that those atrocities ended. Happy Columbus Day.”
Liz Wheeler✔
@Liz_Wheeler
Christopher Columbus didn't commit genocide.
Within 200 years of Columbus's arrival, 95% of the 20M Native Americans died... from disease. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, cholera.
Tragic, definitely. But mass murder by Columbus? Not even close.
4:12 PM - Oct 14, 2019
Andrew Kimmel, BuzzFeed’s former head of live video quickly knocked down Wheeler’s assertions.
“His own journals prove otherwise,” Kimmel fired back on Twitter. “Why must you lie about everything?”
Wheeler then dared Kimmel to show her the evidence.
“Do some journalism,” Kimmel replied with a few hints for Wheeler.
In 2015, Vox came up with 9 reasons “Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.”
OPINION
Corporate Media Will Defend Trump to the Bitter End
Jim Naureckas / FAIR - truthdig
9/30/19
Doonesbury cartoon by Garry Trudeau from 1974
Things never change, do they—or do they? In 1974, of course, there was an expectation that if Richard Nixon were impeached and put on trial in the Senate, there was a chance that at least some Republicans would vote to remove him from office—which is why Nixon resigned when it looked like impeachment and a Senate trial were a certainty.
In 2019, of course, few see any likelihood at all that a Republican-dominated Senate would ever vote Trump out of office, regardless of what charges the House might impeach him with—even if he knocked over a bank, say, or shot the proverbial “somebody on Fifth Avenue.”
What’s changed between 1974 and 2019? The biggest transformation was the realization of the longstanding Republican dream—perhaps first articulated in a memo drafted by Roger Ailes for the Nixon White House (Gawker, 6/30/11)—of a right-wing media network that would do an end-run around what was seen as a media establishment hostile to the GOP: “It avoids the censorship, the priorities and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators,” Ailes’ GOP TV proposal promised.
The idea that the media establishment was inherently hostile to Republicans was largely a delusion; newspapers endorsed Nixon over Democratic challenger George McGovern 753 to 56, after all. But merely not having the selling of conservative policies as their primary motivation made corporate media an obstacle and therefore an enemy—and Ailes worked tirelessly to create a parallel media system that would deliver the news as the right wing wants it to be seen—”The Way Things Ought to Be,” as the title of a book by Ailes protege Rush Limbaugh put it.
The main value of Fox News, the cable behemoth launched by Ailes on behalf of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is that it teaches conservative viewers that no facts or logic can force them to believe anything they don’t want to believe. Much as the tobacco and fossil fuel industries created their own realms of pseudo-scholarship where smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer and greenhouse gasses don’t warm the planet, Fox creates a parallel universe where conservatives are always victims, never villains, and any evidence to the contrary is simply—as the shopworn saying goes—”fake news.”
The corporate media establishment is devoted to the peculiar notion of “objectivity” (FAIR.org, 7/20/12)—which, somewhat counterintuitively, rejects the idea that there is an objective reality that journalists can meaningfully describe, and instead limits reporters’ role to repeating claims made about reality by various sources. On matters of national importance, these sources mostly consist of powerful government officials, including representatives of the major opposition party. This system allows reality as described in the most prestigious media outlets to be defined by the leadership of the two-party establishment—which turned out to be a good recipe for a stable, self-sustaining political class (one whose policy proposals could be counted on not to threaten the profits of media owners or sponsors).
Stable, that is, until one party figures out that the system allows them to say whatever they want. The rise of the right-wing media machine allowed Republicans to create their own self-serving fantasy world—and the rules of the centrist establishment meant that that bizarro version had to be incorporated into the consensus media reality. When the president is accused of a crime, he need not disprove the allegations, but merely needs to put forward a version of events in which he is the one fighting crime, and his accuser a traitor working on behalf of a shadowy cabal. This becomes the unquestioned reality of the right-wing parallel universe—and an on-the-other-hand option offered by the centrist press.
In 2019, of course, few see any likelihood at all that a Republican-dominated Senate would ever vote Trump out of office, regardless of what charges the House might impeach him with—even if he knocked over a bank, say, or shot the proverbial “somebody on Fifth Avenue.”
What’s changed between 1974 and 2019? The biggest transformation was the realization of the longstanding Republican dream—perhaps first articulated in a memo drafted by Roger Ailes for the Nixon White House (Gawker, 6/30/11)—of a right-wing media network that would do an end-run around what was seen as a media establishment hostile to the GOP: “It avoids the censorship, the priorities and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators,” Ailes’ GOP TV proposal promised.
The idea that the media establishment was inherently hostile to Republicans was largely a delusion; newspapers endorsed Nixon over Democratic challenger George McGovern 753 to 56, after all. But merely not having the selling of conservative policies as their primary motivation made corporate media an obstacle and therefore an enemy—and Ailes worked tirelessly to create a parallel media system that would deliver the news as the right wing wants it to be seen—”The Way Things Ought to Be,” as the title of a book by Ailes protege Rush Limbaugh put it.
The main value of Fox News, the cable behemoth launched by Ailes on behalf of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is that it teaches conservative viewers that no facts or logic can force them to believe anything they don’t want to believe. Much as the tobacco and fossil fuel industries created their own realms of pseudo-scholarship where smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer and greenhouse gasses don’t warm the planet, Fox creates a parallel universe where conservatives are always victims, never villains, and any evidence to the contrary is simply—as the shopworn saying goes—”fake news.”
The corporate media establishment is devoted to the peculiar notion of “objectivity” (FAIR.org, 7/20/12)—which, somewhat counterintuitively, rejects the idea that there is an objective reality that journalists can meaningfully describe, and instead limits reporters’ role to repeating claims made about reality by various sources. On matters of national importance, these sources mostly consist of powerful government officials, including representatives of the major opposition party. This system allows reality as described in the most prestigious media outlets to be defined by the leadership of the two-party establishment—which turned out to be a good recipe for a stable, self-sustaining political class (one whose policy proposals could be counted on not to threaten the profits of media owners or sponsors).
Stable, that is, until one party figures out that the system allows them to say whatever they want. The rise of the right-wing media machine allowed Republicans to create their own self-serving fantasy world—and the rules of the centrist establishment meant that that bizarro version had to be incorporated into the consensus media reality. When the president is accused of a crime, he need not disprove the allegations, but merely needs to put forward a version of events in which he is the one fighting crime, and his accuser a traitor working on behalf of a shadowy cabal. This becomes the unquestioned reality of the right-wing parallel universe—and an on-the-other-hand option offered by the centrist press.
Here’s how the New York Times is helping Trump get away with his corrupt Ukraine stunt
September 23, 2019
By Matthew Chapman - raw story
For all President Donald Trump’s hatred of the “failing New York Times” and all the invaluable work its journalists have done breaking stories of corruption and abuse in the administration, the paper has made serious editorial errors in its rush to get scoops on presidential candidates — often to Republicans’ benefit. Most notably, in 2016, the Times partnered with Trump ally and former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon to promote a false allegation of self-dealing at the Clinton Foundation — which set the tone for how the Clintons’ charity work was covered for the whole campaign cycle.
In 2019, the Times hasn’t struck deals with right-wing partisans. But, wrote Jonathan Chait for New York Magazine, their coverage of Trump’s smear of Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy was still badly conceived — and does more to help Trump promote the conspiracy theory than to debunk it or explore the abuses of power he used to put the story out.
“On May 1, The New York Times published a story that contained the most important facets of the Ukraine story,” wrote Chait. The Times reported that President Trump, through his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was pressing Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden. And yet, having uncovered a massive scandal, the Times buried its own scoop. The revelation, which many people now see an an impeachable offense, was buried in the middle of a story that was primarily devoted to carrying Trump’s water.”
“Headlined ‘Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,’ the story spun out a version of the narrative Giuliani has been trying to implant in the media,” continued Chait. “It suggested that, during his tenure as vice-president, Joe Biden took untoward action to help his son Hunter’s business in Ukraine by demanding the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating him. The news about Trump’s role arrived only after nine paragraphs of insinuations against Biden. And then, after a brief detour that casually reveals that the Biden story is the product of an extraordinary abuse of power by the president, it returns to a long unspooling of the Biden-Ukraine narrative.”
“The Times article had important ramifications,” Chait wrote. “It immediately cast Trump’s Biden campaign as an oh-by-the-way detail, allowing the scandal to fester unremarked in the background for months until happenstance thrust it back into the headlines. The strange saga of the Times scoop also suggests something more disturbing: that Trump has hacked into the mainstream media’s ethics and turned them to his advantage. What’s more, even now that his conduct has been exposed, Trump’s gambit that he could abuse his power to discredit an opponent may yet succeed.”
The problem is that even though Trump’s attacks on Biden have already been debunked, and even though the Times does say this, readers who just see the headline or skim the first few paragraphs won’t get that impression. Thus, the articles may actually help Trump spread the false narrative — and Trump’s associates, having seen how issues like the Clinton Foundation or the email server were covered, understand that there’s no downside to the way the Times reports on them.
“Giuliani’s barely controlled performance on CNN with Chris Cuomo might have appeared like a failure of spin, but he succeeded in his primary goal of juxtaposing ‘Biden’ with words like ‘corrupt’ and ‘scandal’ dozens of times over half an hour of airtime,” wrote Chait. “Giuliani explained on Fox News how the method can work. ‘It’s the only way you can get this out. The only way they would cover this story is by punching the president in the face, and then the president deflects the punch, which he’s done, the story came down, and then he hits with a right hand that’s more powerful.’ Anything that results in the media’s raising questions about Democrats helps Trump, however minor or unfounded the questions may be.”
“The inexhaustible fire hose of Trumpian misconduct has only made this formula more effective,” Chait concluded ominously. “Trump’s supporters hold him to the lowest imaginable standard of conduct, while Democratic voters hold their leaders to fairly high standards. Trump’s base is almost immune to news of misconduct by him, while the Democratic base is highly sensitive to it. It’s therefore plausible for Trump to assume that a story that combines unsubstantiated allegations against people in his opponent’s orbit with massive, undisguised abuse of power by Trump himself is a net win.”
RELATED: Ex-Republican delivers scathing rebuke of Dem inaction on impeachment — and explains how the GOP would handle it
“First, Democrats thought Robert Mueller would save them, so they waited & waited for his report, did nothing in the meantime,” he writes. “Then they thought getting control of the House would fix everything. Nothing has happened. Now we must wait for the White House. Wait is all we ever do.”
In 2019, the Times hasn’t struck deals with right-wing partisans. But, wrote Jonathan Chait for New York Magazine, their coverage of Trump’s smear of Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy was still badly conceived — and does more to help Trump promote the conspiracy theory than to debunk it or explore the abuses of power he used to put the story out.
“On May 1, The New York Times published a story that contained the most important facets of the Ukraine story,” wrote Chait. The Times reported that President Trump, through his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was pressing Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden. And yet, having uncovered a massive scandal, the Times buried its own scoop. The revelation, which many people now see an an impeachable offense, was buried in the middle of a story that was primarily devoted to carrying Trump’s water.”
“Headlined ‘Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,’ the story spun out a version of the narrative Giuliani has been trying to implant in the media,” continued Chait. “It suggested that, during his tenure as vice-president, Joe Biden took untoward action to help his son Hunter’s business in Ukraine by demanding the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating him. The news about Trump’s role arrived only after nine paragraphs of insinuations against Biden. And then, after a brief detour that casually reveals that the Biden story is the product of an extraordinary abuse of power by the president, it returns to a long unspooling of the Biden-Ukraine narrative.”
“The Times article had important ramifications,” Chait wrote. “It immediately cast Trump’s Biden campaign as an oh-by-the-way detail, allowing the scandal to fester unremarked in the background for months until happenstance thrust it back into the headlines. The strange saga of the Times scoop also suggests something more disturbing: that Trump has hacked into the mainstream media’s ethics and turned them to his advantage. What’s more, even now that his conduct has been exposed, Trump’s gambit that he could abuse his power to discredit an opponent may yet succeed.”
The problem is that even though Trump’s attacks on Biden have already been debunked, and even though the Times does say this, readers who just see the headline or skim the first few paragraphs won’t get that impression. Thus, the articles may actually help Trump spread the false narrative — and Trump’s associates, having seen how issues like the Clinton Foundation or the email server were covered, understand that there’s no downside to the way the Times reports on them.
“Giuliani’s barely controlled performance on CNN with Chris Cuomo might have appeared like a failure of spin, but he succeeded in his primary goal of juxtaposing ‘Biden’ with words like ‘corrupt’ and ‘scandal’ dozens of times over half an hour of airtime,” wrote Chait. “Giuliani explained on Fox News how the method can work. ‘It’s the only way you can get this out. The only way they would cover this story is by punching the president in the face, and then the president deflects the punch, which he’s done, the story came down, and then he hits with a right hand that’s more powerful.’ Anything that results in the media’s raising questions about Democrats helps Trump, however minor or unfounded the questions may be.”
“The inexhaustible fire hose of Trumpian misconduct has only made this formula more effective,” Chait concluded ominously. “Trump’s supporters hold him to the lowest imaginable standard of conduct, while Democratic voters hold their leaders to fairly high standards. Trump’s base is almost immune to news of misconduct by him, while the Democratic base is highly sensitive to it. It’s therefore plausible for Trump to assume that a story that combines unsubstantiated allegations against people in his opponent’s orbit with massive, undisguised abuse of power by Trump himself is a net win.”
RELATED: Ex-Republican delivers scathing rebuke of Dem inaction on impeachment — and explains how the GOP would handle it
“First, Democrats thought Robert Mueller would save them, so they waited & waited for his report, did nothing in the meantime,” he writes. “Then they thought getting control of the House would fix everything. Nothing has happened. Now we must wait for the White House. Wait is all we ever do.”
Good grief, New York Times—Trump is not a 'populist' like Warren
Eric Boehlert for Daily Kos
Community
Sunday September 22, 2019 · 7:45 AM PDT
Signaling that it's going to work hard to elevate Donald Trump during the upcoming presidential campaign, The New York Times recently suggested that Trump and Elizabeth Warren are politically similar because both offer up a version of "populism." They just do it from different perspectives, the article posited. Specifically, the Times dissected speeches that each gave on the same day last week. "The two back-to-back addresses laid out the competing versions of populism that could come to define the presidential campaign," the newspaper noted.
This is wildly misguided. It's also a continuation of the media’s Both Sides Olympics, and represents a depressing preview of 2020 coverage, where journalists scramble to make sure Trump and whoever the Democratic nominee is appear to be somewhat similar, or at least of similar stature. (The Times is not alone on this: "Trump v Warren rallies preview possible 2020 populist duel," read a BBC headline last week.)
The truth is, “populist” serves as a crutch. And when it’s used today, the identifier represents a lazy shorthand used to describe Trump’s grab bag of often-contradictory political positions. Words matter, which is why journalists should be reaching for "nativist," "white nationalist," and "authoritarian"—not "populist"—when identifying Trump.
Yet "populist" persists. And in the unfolding campaign scenario, that means elevating Trump, a congenital liar, a racist, and someone with questionable mental stability, to the same status as Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. senator and a Harvard Law School professor. It's a concerted effort to pretend that Trump is a serious person like Warren, and has given lots of thought to his political philosophy in terms of a populist agenda. In other words, it's a complete fantasy. But it's one the press is very comfortable promoting. In fact, it's one the press must promote during the upcoming 2020 campaign in order to continue its long-running pattern of trying to normalize Trump's behavior. (The seemingly impossible alternative is to aggressively call out Trump's radical and unsettling behavior.)
Reminder: Populism represents a political struggle on behalf of regular people against elite economic forces. It's an ideology that pits ordinary people against a self-serving elite, appealing to a sense that the political establishment has grown corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of everyday people. Today, Trump’s brand of pro-corporate, anti-worker politics represents the exact opposite.
Indeed, "populist" and "economic anxiety" were two of the media's biggest Trump cons of the 2016 campaign.
Trump’s alleged “populism” enticed the press and provided journalists with an acceptable, nonthreatening way to address his primary and general election successes. It was a way to downplay white nationalism, race-baiting, and sexism as the driving forces of his campaign.
Once in office, Trump's only signature piece of signed legislation was a gift basket of tax cuts for corporate America and the very wealthy. Meanwhile, Trump spent most of 2017 trying to kill Obamacare, which would have meant the elimination of healthcare coverage for millions of working-class Americans. He also tried to block overtime pay for workers making less than $47,000 a year, and abolish the government block grant program that helps fund Meals on Wheels for the elderly. His administration has been a sea of open corruption. Trump's trade war has decimated markets for Midwestern farmers, while his Cabinet members and top advisers have been a rotating door of lobbyists, businessmen, and billionaires. Basically, since taking office, Trump has relentlessly favored the wealthy over members of the working class.
Contrast that with Warren's aggressively populist plans to curb the power of the big banks, big pharma, big oil, and the increasingly monopolistic tech companies. Indeed, she's running on one of the most aggressively populist agendas in recent American presidential history. Looking at Trump and Warren side-by-side, it's comical to even pretend that Trump falls under the "populist" umbrella the way Warren does. But I guarantee you, Trump's "populism" will be a driving force of the media's campaign narrative over the next 14 months.
Note that during the past two years, many commentators have pontificated about how Trump is clearly not a populist. And that includes lots of writers appearing in The New York Times. "Message to those in the news media who keep calling Donald Trump a “populist”: I do not think that word means what you think it means," warned Times columnist Paul Krugman last year. "When you describe Trump using that word, you are in effect complicit in his lie — especially when you do it in the context of supposedly objective reporting."
So yes, there seemed to be something of a widespread agreement within the press that Trump has not governed as a populist (obviously). But now with the campaign season looming, there seems to be a pull to bring back that misleading describer, especially if Trump faces off against an actual populist Democrat next year. That, despite the fact that the man-of-the-people adjective so obviously does not apply to a president who has gone golfing more than 200 times since being sworn into office. (It's an indulgence that has cost taxpayers more than $100 million to date.)
The Times piece last week essentially conceded that Trump has not governed as a populist, but stressed, "Mr. Trump has still positioned himself for re-election as an anti-establishment brawler." Oh, so Trump has positioned himself as a populist. How, in part, does he do that? He does that by having news outlets such as The New York Times publish long articles about how he's supposedly a populist, of course.
This is wildly misguided. It's also a continuation of the media’s Both Sides Olympics, and represents a depressing preview of 2020 coverage, where journalists scramble to make sure Trump and whoever the Democratic nominee is appear to be somewhat similar, or at least of similar stature. (The Times is not alone on this: "Trump v Warren rallies preview possible 2020 populist duel," read a BBC headline last week.)
The truth is, “populist” serves as a crutch. And when it’s used today, the identifier represents a lazy shorthand used to describe Trump’s grab bag of often-contradictory political positions. Words matter, which is why journalists should be reaching for "nativist," "white nationalist," and "authoritarian"—not "populist"—when identifying Trump.
Yet "populist" persists. And in the unfolding campaign scenario, that means elevating Trump, a congenital liar, a racist, and someone with questionable mental stability, to the same status as Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. senator and a Harvard Law School professor. It's a concerted effort to pretend that Trump is a serious person like Warren, and has given lots of thought to his political philosophy in terms of a populist agenda. In other words, it's a complete fantasy. But it's one the press is very comfortable promoting. In fact, it's one the press must promote during the upcoming 2020 campaign in order to continue its long-running pattern of trying to normalize Trump's behavior. (The seemingly impossible alternative is to aggressively call out Trump's radical and unsettling behavior.)
Reminder: Populism represents a political struggle on behalf of regular people against elite economic forces. It's an ideology that pits ordinary people against a self-serving elite, appealing to a sense that the political establishment has grown corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of everyday people. Today, Trump’s brand of pro-corporate, anti-worker politics represents the exact opposite.
Indeed, "populist" and "economic anxiety" were two of the media's biggest Trump cons of the 2016 campaign.
Trump’s alleged “populism” enticed the press and provided journalists with an acceptable, nonthreatening way to address his primary and general election successes. It was a way to downplay white nationalism, race-baiting, and sexism as the driving forces of his campaign.
Once in office, Trump's only signature piece of signed legislation was a gift basket of tax cuts for corporate America and the very wealthy. Meanwhile, Trump spent most of 2017 trying to kill Obamacare, which would have meant the elimination of healthcare coverage for millions of working-class Americans. He also tried to block overtime pay for workers making less than $47,000 a year, and abolish the government block grant program that helps fund Meals on Wheels for the elderly. His administration has been a sea of open corruption. Trump's trade war has decimated markets for Midwestern farmers, while his Cabinet members and top advisers have been a rotating door of lobbyists, businessmen, and billionaires. Basically, since taking office, Trump has relentlessly favored the wealthy over members of the working class.
Contrast that with Warren's aggressively populist plans to curb the power of the big banks, big pharma, big oil, and the increasingly monopolistic tech companies. Indeed, she's running on one of the most aggressively populist agendas in recent American presidential history. Looking at Trump and Warren side-by-side, it's comical to even pretend that Trump falls under the "populist" umbrella the way Warren does. But I guarantee you, Trump's "populism" will be a driving force of the media's campaign narrative over the next 14 months.
Note that during the past two years, many commentators have pontificated about how Trump is clearly not a populist. And that includes lots of writers appearing in The New York Times. "Message to those in the news media who keep calling Donald Trump a “populist”: I do not think that word means what you think it means," warned Times columnist Paul Krugman last year. "When you describe Trump using that word, you are in effect complicit in his lie — especially when you do it in the context of supposedly objective reporting."
So yes, there seemed to be something of a widespread agreement within the press that Trump has not governed as a populist (obviously). But now with the campaign season looming, there seems to be a pull to bring back that misleading describer, especially if Trump faces off against an actual populist Democrat next year. That, despite the fact that the man-of-the-people adjective so obviously does not apply to a president who has gone golfing more than 200 times since being sworn into office. (It's an indulgence that has cost taxpayers more than $100 million to date.)
The Times piece last week essentially conceded that Trump has not governed as a populist, but stressed, "Mr. Trump has still positioned himself for re-election as an anti-establishment brawler." Oh, so Trump has positioned himself as a populist. How, in part, does he do that? He does that by having news outlets such as The New York Times publish long articles about how he's supposedly a populist, of course.
KOCH DATA MINING COMPANY HELPED INUNDATE VOTERS WITH ANTI-IMMIGRANT MESSAGES
Lee Fang - the intercept
September 9 2019, 12:40 p.m.
IN RECENT YEARS, Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist megadonor to Republicans and libertarian causes, has carefully recalibrated his public image, releasing a variety of statements to assert that he supports immigration and opposes President Donald Trump’s blatant scapegoating of undocumented immigrants and foreigners.
At the same time, however, Koch’s sprawling political network’s in-house technology company has mined consumer data to motivate Republican voters with dehumanizing messages that depict immigrants as an invading army of criminals and potential terrorists.
Last year, when many GOP candidates across the country turned to vicious anti-immigrant advertisements to turn out voters in the midterm elections, some turned to i360, Koch’s state-of-the-art data analytics company. The company is one of the several appendages of the Koch political machine — one that includes a suite of voter outreach organization, lobbying, and campaign messaging tools.
Dozens of GOP candidates for state and federal office contracted with the Koch data company to identify voter segments and push out targeted ads on television and social media in 2018. And the company looks to be expanding its role in GOP campaigns going into 2020; more than a dozen federal candidates list the firm as a contractor.
The path to one Republican’s successful 2018 Senate run is detailed on i360’s website. Then-Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn aired at least four different television advertisements and a wave of social media advertisements focused on immigration, often with false or inflammatory language. She ended up beating out Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who had been leading in the polls for months.
“A CARAVAN OF 14,000 illegal immigrants is marching on America … gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists,” intoned an ad for Blackburn, flashing images of Hispanic men and warning of a flood of immigrants welcomed by her Democratic opponent, Bredesen.
“Phil Bredesen gave driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Phil Bredesen opposes the Trump immigration ban,” declared another Blackburn ad. At one point, the ad displays an image of the Middle East and Africa.
The messages about the caravan were far-fetched given the fact that there is no evidence that the migrant caravan from Honduras contained any terrorists or members from the Middle East, as fact-checkers noted during the campaign. The driver’s license claim was also misleading: Tennessee briefly offered driver’s licenses to those without a Social Security number through a 2001 law signed by former Republican Gov. Don Sundquist. The law was later amended and repealed under Bredesen’s tenure as governor.
“It was Phil Bredesen who lured illegal immigrants to Tennessee,” other Blackburn advertisements on television and social media claimed.
“The invading force approaching our southern border is seeking to enter the country is wrong,” read a grammatically challenged paid advertisement on Facebook posted by the Blackburn campaign. Another promoted post from the Blackburn campaign decried the “illegal alien mob marching on our border.”
The ads, crude as they might have appeared, were distributed using an empirical approach to motivating Republican voters. The Blackburn campaign had turned to Koch’s i360 company to develop “a series of custom predictive models” to peel Republican voters away from Bredesen, according to a testimonial for potential clients.
Blackburn, a firebrand of the religious right who positioned herself as a steadfast ally to Trump and opponent of allowing Muslim refugees into the country, was clearly aligned with Koch priorities. Blackburn also supports judicial appointments favored by the business-friendly Federalist Society, corporate tax cuts, and scaling back most forms of environmental regulations, the criteria on which the Koch network has made its political endorsements historically.
Americans for Prosperity, the primary political advocacy arm of the Koch network, founded by Charles’s brother David, who passed away in August, and financed by Charles’s close-knit group of likeminded business owners, spent $5.6 million to support Blackburn’s Senate run through its nonprofit and Super PAC arm. That much is well reported and public. But the role of i360 in guiding the campaign’s anti-immigrant messages did not become clear until after the election.
THE COMPANY SEGMENTED Republican supporters for Bredesen, a Democrat, using its vast database of voter profiles. The data suggested immigration could be used as a wedge. “From there,” the testimonial notes, “i360 further segmented the universe using the Sanctuary Cities model which identified voters likely to oppose Sanctuary City policies like allowing illegal immigrants to get drivers’ licenses — a policy Bredesen favored while Governor.”
The i360 database was integrated into the Blackburn campaign’s media strategy. The company’s television advertising service, i360 Rabbit Ears, allows campaigns to target television programs and schedules favored by various behavioral profiles. I360 sorts television programs by over 40 voter profiles, including anti-immigrant sentiment. The company refers to this voting bloc as: “Individuals who have a high likelihood of believing that undocumented immigrants should be required to leave the United States.”
Blackburn’s media consultants, through a company called Smart Media Group, not only relied on i360 data to inform its advertisement buying strategy, but its data findings were merged into Blackburn’s canvassing effort as well. Field staff used the i360 voter profiles to determine which messages to use when knocking on doors of potential voters and could “educate voters about Marsha’s positions by showing them videos right from their iPads.”
The i360 team also developed “140 unique segments,” an advertising term that refers to unique demographic profiles, “against which the campaign delivered millions of impressions across several different platforms including Google and Facebook.” The individual segments allowed the Blackburn campaign to send customized messages to each voter profile over a variety of platforms, a dynamic that allowed the campaign to “tailor their messaging to ensure they were talking about the issues that mattered to each voter.”
In the end, i360 boasts that the Blackburn campaign used its technology to shape 3 million voter contact calls, 1.5 million doors knocked, $8.4 million spent on television ads, and 314,000 campaign text messages — advocacy that led to Blackburn’s commanding victory over Bredesen, who had been favored in the polls for the months leading up to the election.
Federal Election Commission records show that Blackburn’s campaign paid $188,366 to i360 for a variety of services — a small price for the significant campaign services the company provided.
FOUNDED IN THE aftermath of the 2012 election, in which Republican candidates favored by Koch fared poorly, i360 was envisioned as a way to revolutionize right-wing pressure campaigns and election efforts by incorporating the latest in data science. The company, based in the same Arlington, Virginia, office complex that houses other Koch groups, harvests troves of data to build profiles of every voter and potential voter in the country. Over the course of four years, the Koch network poured $50 million into i360 to develop its capabilities.
Journalist Sue Halperin noted that i360 acts as somewhat of a data broker, combining “commercial sources, such as shopping habits, credit status, homeownership, and religious affiliation, with voting histories, social media content, and any connections a voter might have had with advocacy groups or other campaigns” to build its voter database.
The i360 profiles offer a dizzying array of ways to segment voter preferences. The company allows GOP campaigns to target voters based on equity held in their home, likelihood that an individual has been personally affected by the heroin crisis, views on gay marriage, interest in dogs, levels of religious devotion, and even psychological profiles that measure an individual’s ego, based on previous purchases of monogrammed clothing.
Notably, according to CNET, i360 partners with D2 Media Sales, a joint venture with DirectTV and Dish, “‘to push TV ads to specific households that meet a candidate’s criteria ‘no matter which stations or programs they’re watching.'”
And the firm appears to still be a central cog in the Koch advocacy machine. Demeter Analytics Services, the holding company that owns i360, is listed as a subsidiary of the Seminar Network Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit that serves as the central clearing house for the Koch political spending, in its most recent tax filing.
Media attention has swirled over the role of technology firms that have harnessed sophisticated targeting methods to influence campaigns. Billionaire hedge fund investor Robert Mercer, once a participant in the Koch network, split off and formed his own array of groups, including an effort to fund Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 targeting methods. Less scrutiny has been paid to i360’s role in shaping the political climate. Both firms vacuum up incredible amounts of data to develop personalized voter outreach methods, allowing campaigns to peer deeply into the hearts of voters and trigger emotional responses — a revolution in campaign strategy that gives well-heeled donors with access to the technology a tremendous advantage.
Over the last year, Charles Koch has stated his support for lofty, high-minded goals such as ending over-incarceration, scaling back America’s military empire, defending free speech, and providing legal status for undocumented youth. These laudable positions, however, have not translated to changing the behavior of his political advocacy apparatus.
The Intercept has previously reported on Koch’s financing of tough-on-crime advocacy and support for Congress’ most militaristic, surveillance-friendly lawmakers. That the Koch political operation also deliberately fine-tunes anti-immigrant messages further undermines Koch’s purported beliefs. Neither Blackburn nor Mark Holden, the Koch Industries executive who simultaneously helps manage the company’s political and philanthropic investments, responded to a request for comment.
At the same time, however, Koch’s sprawling political network’s in-house technology company has mined consumer data to motivate Republican voters with dehumanizing messages that depict immigrants as an invading army of criminals and potential terrorists.
Last year, when many GOP candidates across the country turned to vicious anti-immigrant advertisements to turn out voters in the midterm elections, some turned to i360, Koch’s state-of-the-art data analytics company. The company is one of the several appendages of the Koch political machine — one that includes a suite of voter outreach organization, lobbying, and campaign messaging tools.
Dozens of GOP candidates for state and federal office contracted with the Koch data company to identify voter segments and push out targeted ads on television and social media in 2018. And the company looks to be expanding its role in GOP campaigns going into 2020; more than a dozen federal candidates list the firm as a contractor.
The path to one Republican’s successful 2018 Senate run is detailed on i360’s website. Then-Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn aired at least four different television advertisements and a wave of social media advertisements focused on immigration, often with false or inflammatory language. She ended up beating out Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who had been leading in the polls for months.
“A CARAVAN OF 14,000 illegal immigrants is marching on America … gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists,” intoned an ad for Blackburn, flashing images of Hispanic men and warning of a flood of immigrants welcomed by her Democratic opponent, Bredesen.
“Phil Bredesen gave driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Phil Bredesen opposes the Trump immigration ban,” declared another Blackburn ad. At one point, the ad displays an image of the Middle East and Africa.
The messages about the caravan were far-fetched given the fact that there is no evidence that the migrant caravan from Honduras contained any terrorists or members from the Middle East, as fact-checkers noted during the campaign. The driver’s license claim was also misleading: Tennessee briefly offered driver’s licenses to those without a Social Security number through a 2001 law signed by former Republican Gov. Don Sundquist. The law was later amended and repealed under Bredesen’s tenure as governor.
“It was Phil Bredesen who lured illegal immigrants to Tennessee,” other Blackburn advertisements on television and social media claimed.
“The invading force approaching our southern border is seeking to enter the country is wrong,” read a grammatically challenged paid advertisement on Facebook posted by the Blackburn campaign. Another promoted post from the Blackburn campaign decried the “illegal alien mob marching on our border.”
The ads, crude as they might have appeared, were distributed using an empirical approach to motivating Republican voters. The Blackburn campaign had turned to Koch’s i360 company to develop “a series of custom predictive models” to peel Republican voters away from Bredesen, according to a testimonial for potential clients.
Blackburn, a firebrand of the religious right who positioned herself as a steadfast ally to Trump and opponent of allowing Muslim refugees into the country, was clearly aligned with Koch priorities. Blackburn also supports judicial appointments favored by the business-friendly Federalist Society, corporate tax cuts, and scaling back most forms of environmental regulations, the criteria on which the Koch network has made its political endorsements historically.
Americans for Prosperity, the primary political advocacy arm of the Koch network, founded by Charles’s brother David, who passed away in August, and financed by Charles’s close-knit group of likeminded business owners, spent $5.6 million to support Blackburn’s Senate run through its nonprofit and Super PAC arm. That much is well reported and public. But the role of i360 in guiding the campaign’s anti-immigrant messages did not become clear until after the election.
THE COMPANY SEGMENTED Republican supporters for Bredesen, a Democrat, using its vast database of voter profiles. The data suggested immigration could be used as a wedge. “From there,” the testimonial notes, “i360 further segmented the universe using the Sanctuary Cities model which identified voters likely to oppose Sanctuary City policies like allowing illegal immigrants to get drivers’ licenses — a policy Bredesen favored while Governor.”
The i360 database was integrated into the Blackburn campaign’s media strategy. The company’s television advertising service, i360 Rabbit Ears, allows campaigns to target television programs and schedules favored by various behavioral profiles. I360 sorts television programs by over 40 voter profiles, including anti-immigrant sentiment. The company refers to this voting bloc as: “Individuals who have a high likelihood of believing that undocumented immigrants should be required to leave the United States.”
Blackburn’s media consultants, through a company called Smart Media Group, not only relied on i360 data to inform its advertisement buying strategy, but its data findings were merged into Blackburn’s canvassing effort as well. Field staff used the i360 voter profiles to determine which messages to use when knocking on doors of potential voters and could “educate voters about Marsha’s positions by showing them videos right from their iPads.”
The i360 team also developed “140 unique segments,” an advertising term that refers to unique demographic profiles, “against which the campaign delivered millions of impressions across several different platforms including Google and Facebook.” The individual segments allowed the Blackburn campaign to send customized messages to each voter profile over a variety of platforms, a dynamic that allowed the campaign to “tailor their messaging to ensure they were talking about the issues that mattered to each voter.”
In the end, i360 boasts that the Blackburn campaign used its technology to shape 3 million voter contact calls, 1.5 million doors knocked, $8.4 million spent on television ads, and 314,000 campaign text messages — advocacy that led to Blackburn’s commanding victory over Bredesen, who had been favored in the polls for the months leading up to the election.
Federal Election Commission records show that Blackburn’s campaign paid $188,366 to i360 for a variety of services — a small price for the significant campaign services the company provided.
FOUNDED IN THE aftermath of the 2012 election, in which Republican candidates favored by Koch fared poorly, i360 was envisioned as a way to revolutionize right-wing pressure campaigns and election efforts by incorporating the latest in data science. The company, based in the same Arlington, Virginia, office complex that houses other Koch groups, harvests troves of data to build profiles of every voter and potential voter in the country. Over the course of four years, the Koch network poured $50 million into i360 to develop its capabilities.
Journalist Sue Halperin noted that i360 acts as somewhat of a data broker, combining “commercial sources, such as shopping habits, credit status, homeownership, and religious affiliation, with voting histories, social media content, and any connections a voter might have had with advocacy groups or other campaigns” to build its voter database.
The i360 profiles offer a dizzying array of ways to segment voter preferences. The company allows GOP campaigns to target voters based on equity held in their home, likelihood that an individual has been personally affected by the heroin crisis, views on gay marriage, interest in dogs, levels of religious devotion, and even psychological profiles that measure an individual’s ego, based on previous purchases of monogrammed clothing.
Notably, according to CNET, i360 partners with D2 Media Sales, a joint venture with DirectTV and Dish, “‘to push TV ads to specific households that meet a candidate’s criteria ‘no matter which stations or programs they’re watching.'”
And the firm appears to still be a central cog in the Koch advocacy machine. Demeter Analytics Services, the holding company that owns i360, is listed as a subsidiary of the Seminar Network Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit that serves as the central clearing house for the Koch political spending, in its most recent tax filing.
Media attention has swirled over the role of technology firms that have harnessed sophisticated targeting methods to influence campaigns. Billionaire hedge fund investor Robert Mercer, once a participant in the Koch network, split off and formed his own array of groups, including an effort to fund Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 targeting methods. Less scrutiny has been paid to i360’s role in shaping the political climate. Both firms vacuum up incredible amounts of data to develop personalized voter outreach methods, allowing campaigns to peer deeply into the hearts of voters and trigger emotional responses — a revolution in campaign strategy that gives well-heeled donors with access to the technology a tremendous advantage.
Over the last year, Charles Koch has stated his support for lofty, high-minded goals such as ending over-incarceration, scaling back America’s military empire, defending free speech, and providing legal status for undocumented youth. These laudable positions, however, have not translated to changing the behavior of his political advocacy apparatus.
The Intercept has previously reported on Koch’s financing of tough-on-crime advocacy and support for Congress’ most militaristic, surveillance-friendly lawmakers. That the Koch political operation also deliberately fine-tunes anti-immigrant messages further undermines Koch’s purported beliefs. Neither Blackburn nor Mark Holden, the Koch Industries executive who simultaneously helps manage the company’s political and philanthropic investments, responded to a request for comment.
The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
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https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
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