Facebook leaves no doubt: It's the right wing's social network now - Part One

Billions of people are both participating in and being exposed to Facebook, and the vast majority have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. Everyone should read this.

Part One:



BY MATT BINDER
17 HOURS AGO

Facebook, a social network originally founded as an Ivy League version of Hot or Not, has billions of users and the power to sway elections. In the U.S., where nearly 70 percent of adults are Facebook users, its recent choices make it clear where the company stands: with the party of Donald Trump.

On the day that the company rolled out one of its biggest new products, the Facebook News tab, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided the place he wanted to be on launch day was a media event co-hosted by News Corp.

There, Zuckerberg and News Corp. chief executive Robert Thomson spent an hour yucking it up and reminiscing about old times spent with Thomson’s boss, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News.

During a short Q&A, Zuckerberg was finally forced to address why the right-wing rag Breitbart was included as an official Facebook news partner.



The Facebook CEO defended the decision. Zuckerberg consistently described the News tab as dedicated to curating “high-quality news” as if repeating this over and over again somehow qualified Breitbart — a far-right website that features a “Black Crime” category and employed Milo Yiannopoulos, who used his position to harass people and promote white nationalists — as a legitimate news source.

Days later, Campbell Brown, head of Facebook's news partnerships, shared a piece on the site from the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which is notoriously more conservative than the rest of the paper.

The op-ed defends Facebook’s inclusion of sites like Breitbart as proof the social media company is being fair and balanced. The Wall Street Journal, which is one of the lucky Facebook News partners to get paid, goes so far as to say the far-right outlet Breitbart is evened out by the inclusion of mainstream corporate media outlets like CNN, as if they represent equivalent ends of the political spectrum.

Brown added a blurb of her own in her Facebook post.

“I strongly believe it should be the role of the press to dissect the truth or lies found in political ads - not engineers at a tech company,” Brown writes, unaware that she is fundamentally misunderstanding that her employer’s fact-checking program is performed by third-party outlets and journalists, not Facebook’s programmers.

One such Facebook-approved fact checker is The Daily Caller, a website founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that has a habit of hiring white supremacists.

Not that politicians have to worry about fact-checking — at least when it comes to their ads. In the name of “free speech,” Facebook announced that lawmakers could lie in political advertisements, a policy that should help Donald Trump, who has already spread false information in ads about Joe Biden.

When Mark Zuckerberg was pressed on these new rules by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a recent congressional hearing, Zuckerberg demurred on specific examples of what sort of disinformation is allowed on the platform. However, the Facebook CEO made it clear that the company shouldn’t be policing political speech.

Except, of course, when it wants to. Adriel Hampton, the founder of a left-wing PAC, set out to test Zuckerberg’s rules. After his group’s false Green New Deal ads were removed, he filed to run as a gubernatorial candidate in California.

For all intents and purposes, Hampton is now officially a politician. Well, not according to Facebook.

“This person has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies, so his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking,” the company said in a statement to CNN.

Facebook has now apparently authorized itself to decide who is and isn’t a legitimate politician.

Further proving Facebook’s bias is a recent investigation by Popular Information, a political newsletter started by Judd Legum, the founder of the shuttered progressive news outlet ThinkProgress. Legum discovered that The Daily Wire, the media outlet founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, was breaking Facebook’s policies to spread its content across the platform.

The investigation found a coordinated network of large right-wing Facebook Pages spamming The Daily Wire links, and only The Daily Wire links. Facebook normally deems this kind of activity "inauthentic coordinated behavior," which is against its policies. As recently as last year, Facebook banned hundreds of left-leaning pages for this very thing.

However, Facebook declined to take action against The Daily Wire when it was approached with this information.

Link to Part Two:

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/index.php...al-network-now-part-two.302069/#post-12689026

 

Did you read part two? Yes, it is inflammatory. Zuckerberg's decision making and behavior with regard to our politics and how he is handling politics on Facebook are also inflammatory. Inflammatory and damning, in my opinion.

 

I agree that the title is inflammatory. It's their title, not mine. However, I think it's clear that, whatever Zuckerberg's reasoning, what the guy is doing is favoring one political party over another. The guy is a billionaire. How much money does he need? Zuckerberg is allowing fake, right-wing propaganda to plaster itself all over the major social media site in this country. That's putting aside that it is influencing how the world views us. I applaud what Twitter is doing. In my opinion, Facebook should do the same thing. If they can't prevent hate speech from whatever side, presented as "real news," then they should stop making money off of all of it.

Facebook is no different than a newspaper that leans one way politically. What makes it different is the platform. People are being bombarded with vicious lies and if they aren't widely read people who view a variety of news sources, like some of us are, they think it's the truth. Facebook isn't The Huffington Post, a type of newspaper online that leans Left and is obvious about it, or The Federalist, a right leaning news and opinion source that makes no bones about leaning that way. No, it is seen by its users as something else entirely. Again, if Facebook cannot control the targeted vicious fake "news" it is getting paid to put out there, some of it produced by countries that are trying to influence our elections for their benefit, they shouldn't accept any of it. In my opinion.

 

If it's a political ad, don't accept it. If "news" is clearly "trumped up," and to use a word beloved by Mr trump's ardent followers, "fake," don't allow it. Facebook has made it clear that "anything goes." Who does that benefit? The answer is easy, and I don't mean @Easy. ;-)