MAGA

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/10/2025:

I never noticed before that Mark Zuckerberg is painting his face orange, too.  Is this new?

WTF?

And then they immediately removed THAT post.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Zuckerberg takes a page out of Musk's playbook

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, confused a lot of people last weekend when it said it will begin selling $12-a-month subscriptions starting in Australia and New Zealand, and eventually the United States. No, it is not going to charge everyone for using its social networks.

Instead, Meta is testing a paid account “verification” service. That will come with a blue check mark after they’ve checked your ID and something desperately needed by everyone on Facebook: access to real-human customer service to deal with rampant account lockouts and hacker takeovers. They see your vulnerability as a business opportunity.

  WaPo

To be fair, they see EVERYTHING as a business opportunity, so don't take it personally.

Elon Musk’s Twitter recently said it will start charging for a basic security feature that used to be free. Going forward, Twitter says that two-factor text-message authentication will only be available to people who subscribe to its $8 Blue service.

[...]

While the details are different, both companies’ moves remind me of the protection rackets run by mobsters: force people to make regular payments in exchange for “security.”

Again, to be fair, mob tactics have been proven to work.

Twitter’s shift, [Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security] said, is the equivalent of secretly undoing someone’s seat belt while they’re driving; Facebook’s money grab is like charging them extra to send help when they get in a crash.

Twitter users can move to Post (Pulitzer) or Mastodon. And Facebook users can probably quit Facebook. Unless, of course, you use it for business.

“One of the reasons Facebook accounts are taken over so frequently is because so few users have the second step when they log in. They are easily phished or tricked,” [said a security expert]. (You can, and should turn this on now here.)

Yes, you should.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Actually, it's a Trumpy look

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

During a Thursday press conference, Psaki said White House senior staff were engaging with “social media platforms” to combat the spread of “misinformation specifically on the pandemic.”

“In terms of actions we are taking or that we’re working to take, I should say, from the federal government, we’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the surgeon general’s office. We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation," she said.

[...]

The press secretary’s comments came just moments after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about health misinformation or misinformation regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

Murthy described “false, misleading, or inaccurate information” as “one of the biggest obstacles that’s preventing us from ending this pandemic.”

  Yahoo

How about you just hire some people to respond to those posts on Facebook correcting the ones you're "flagging"?

UPDATE:  Or...(or rather, "and")...

Good decision by Facebook

Good with a caveat

Guardian explains

The caveat: It wasn't a ban.  It was an indefinite suspension, something the Board says isn't in Facebook's rule book, so it sent the matter back to Zuckerberg...

Rather than accepting, or rejecting, the suspension, the oversight board referred the decision back to Facebook. Its rationale is well-argued: Facebook doesn’t have anything in its rulebook about “indefinite suspensions”, and so it clearly has not applied its rules to Trump at all.

[...]

The entire point of the oversight board was to insulate Facebook from the consequences of its power – and the entire point of that was to insulate Mark Zuckerberg from the consequences of his power. By creating the board, Zuckerberg ensured that the most controversial calls would be out of his hands, allowing him to wield sole control over the most important communications network in the world without taking sides on questions of what should be on that network.

Now, for a second time, Zuckerberg will find himself chairing a meeting to decide whether or not to ban Donald Trump from Facebook. For a second time, half of America will never forget his decision, whichever choice he makes. And for a second time, he runs the risk of whatever choice being overturned down the line by the independent body he set up to overrule him.

“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a statement just hours after the decision was announced by Facebook's Oversight Board.

“The People of our Country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process,” he continued.

  The Hill

Again with the projection. Also, social media can't take away anyone's free speech.

Twitter has similarly banned Trump from posting on the platform, but that suspension is permanent.

Facebook should do the same.

Is Mark Zuckerberg a white supremacist?

In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that [Facebook]’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

[...]

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

"Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

  Buzzfeed

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deplatforming the president

Or as the Trumpies say, Cancel culture!

That last one's the one that hurts.

No worries, there's still Parler.

UPDATE:  

Trump’s Snapchat has consistently violated the company's guidelines against hate speech, incitement or glorification of violence and the spread of misinformation that could cause harm, including conspiracy theories and efforts to undermine elections, a Snapchat spokesperson said.

Snapchat is only one in a line of social media platforms and companies that have banned Trump since the Wednesday riots.

Twitter locked Trump from his account for 12 hours, Facebook has placed an indefinite suspension on his account, and Shopify has removed Trump’s official stores from its platform.

  The Hill

Facebook extends Trump suspension indefinitely

The company had initially locked Trump from accessing his Facebook and Instagram accounts for 24 hours starting Wednesday night.

The decision to extend the suspension indefinitely is a marked change from Facebook’s previous hands-off approach to political content, even when Trump appeared to encourage violence.

"We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech," Zuckerberg explained. "But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government."

  The Hill

Uh, Mark? He's been doing that for quite some time. Welcome to the awake world.

Many of Wednesday’s protests were organized on Facebook, and the platform was used by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the results of the election with little punishment beyond vague labels.

[...]

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment on plans to extend that suspension, which expired Thursday morning.

The first violating post was a video urging Trump's supporters who broke into the Capitol to retreat while simultaneously praising the mob and repeating false claims about voter fraud.

"This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people," Trump said in the video. "We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace."

The second video struck a similar tone, urging rioters to “go home” while repeating false claims of his “landslide victory.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Still getting checked by Twitter and Facebook for lying about Covid-19

Facebook removed a post Tuesday from President Trump falsely claiming that the flu is more lethal than COVID-19.

“Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” he wrote in the post. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”

[...]

More than 209,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 this year, more than in the past five flu seasons combined.

The annual flu death total has been between 12,000 and 61,000 since 2010, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.

The last time that U.S. flu deaths hit an estimated 100,000 was in 1968.

[...]

The same Trump message was posted on Twitter. The platform placed a label on the tweet warning that it violated rules about spreading coronavirus misinformation. The post is still viewable, but cannot be interacted with.

  The Hill

The GOP dives deeper into nutjob territory

In the Facebook post, [Georgia Republican congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor] Greene said she was “tired of seeing weak, Establishment Republicans play defense.”

“We need strong conservative Christians to go on offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” Green wrote in the caption of the photo, which included two Muslim lawmakers.

[...]

Greene, a businesswoman who won the GOP primary runoff in a solidly red district in Georgia last month, has previously been a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The theory claims there is a group of U.S. officials and celebrities who are controlling the government to undermine President Trump and run a child sex trafficking ring.

Politico reported in June that Greene has also made other incendiary remarks in recent years, including that Muslims do not belong in government and that there is "an Islamic invasion into our government offices."

Trump congratulated Greene on her primary win last month and previously called her a "future Republican star."

Top Republican lawmakers such as Lindsey Graham (S.C.) have denounced the QAnon theory while Greene herself has distanced herself from the movement.

  The Hill

How?

By the way, Ilhan Omar objected to Greene's disgusting picture post.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded to Omar’s tweet on Thursday, saying the post had been taken down because it violated community guidelines.

“Thank you for raising this, Congresswoman. The image violates our policies and we've removed it,” he tweeted.

Brett Kavanaugh should recuse

A coalition of progressive groups is calling on Justice Brett Kavanaugh to recuse himself from a case against Facebook because of his ties with the platform's chief of policy, Joel Kaplan.

Kaplan, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, appeared behind Kavanaugh during his contentious Senate confirmation hearings and played a role in ushering him through the process.

After the hearing, Kaplan called Kavanaugh and his wife his "closest friends in D.C.”

[...]

"The top lobbyist at Facebook called Kavanaugh his ‘closest friend in Washington’ and even hosted a private celebration for Kavanaugh at his home after he was confirmed despite multiple, credible allegations of sexual assault. Brett Kavanaugh cannot possibly claim to be neutral in this case."

[...]

The groups, including the American Economic Liberties Project, Blue Future and Demand Progress, say that friendship means the justice should recuse himself from a class action case against Facebook scheduled for next term.

  The Hill

I should think so.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Facebook buckles to advertising pressure

Facebook Inc said on Friday that it will start labelling newsworthy content that violates the social media company's policies, and label all posts and ads about voting with links to authoritative information, including those from politicians.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the company's new policy would have covered a link on United States President Donald Trump's post about mail-in ballots last month, to which Facebook's smaller rival Twitter affixed a fact-checking label.

  alJazeera

Zuckerberg had bold reasons of morality and integrity to resist until advertisers started dropping.

The policy change follows an advertising boycott campaign by several US civil rights groups pressuring the company to act on hate speech and misinformation gains traction.

Shares of Facebook and Twitter both fell more than seven percent on Friday after Unilever PLC said it would stop US ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for the rest of the year, citing "divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the US."

Unilever, which owns brands like Dove soap and Lipton tea, and Japanese carmaker Honda Motor Co Ltd's US subsidiary both joined the growing ad boycott against Facebook as part of the "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign started after the death of George Floyd.

[...]

More than 90 advertisers including Unilever's Ben & Jerry's, Verizon Communications Inc and The North Face, a unit of VF Corp, have joined the campaign, according to a list by ad activism group Sleeping Giants, a partner in the campaign.

[...]

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a live-streamed company town hall that Facebook would ban ads that claim people from groups based on race, religion, sexual orientation or immigration status are a threat to physical safety or health.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Mr. Hyde has been busy

He's just not very bright.  Blends right in with the Trump cabal.

UPDATE 1/18:

Facebook being Facebook

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Once and always a blackmailer

Can't get the WSJ article because it's behind a pay wall...but here's an excerpt Judd Legum clipped out:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Facebook helped Trump in 2016

James Barnes spoke with the Wall Street Journal over the last three weeks to detail how he helped guide the Trump campaign to use Facebook tools and products to Trump’s advantage. Barnes left Facebook this spring, and says he is now dedicated to using the same digital-ad strategies he helped Trump exploit to get him out of office in 2020.

  The Daily Beast

Well, thanks, asshole. Now everbody knows what those are and can defend against them.

Barnes told the Journal that he felt pressure while at the company and described in detail how he felt Facebook’s role helped launch Trump to victory. While he says he remains supportive of Facebook’s mission, he said he is uneasy about the reach of the company’s political influence. He told the paper the one question that nags him about his time with Facebook is, “Did I actually do the right thing?”

Obviously, no. And particularly since you're doing the opposite now.

Barnes, a Facebook employee embedded with the campaign and who was once called its “MVP,” took his digital talents to the liberal group Acronym. He came to the organization as it charts out a $75 million plan to help liberals close the gap with Trump online.

“I was absolutely crushed the morning after the election,” Barnes said on Acronym’s podcast, FWIW.

[...]

Barnes, previously a Republican, supported Trump’s campaign through Facebook’s program to help political candidates use the platform. Hillary Clinton also had support from Facebook.

  Vice

Zuckerberg isn't stupid. Like any corporation, they're going to grease palms on both sides so they're always in position no matter which side wins.

“It just was not adopted on the left as it was on the right,” [Tatenda Musapatike, a staffer who worked with Democrats' campaigns] said of Facebook’s efforts. “There were established ways of doing things and I think Democrats were really, really cautious to change — to, I think, our detriment.”

The boot-strapped Trump campaign, however, embraced Barnes’ guidance. It pumped out torrents of cheap, at-times divisive ads to highly targeted audiences, spreading its message and culling small-dollar fundraising.

[...]

Facebook will be even more central to the 2020 contest. Trump has vastly outspent his Democratic rivals so far, crushing fundraising records and enticing users to share all-important personal data.

[...]

“One thing I want to be really clear on is that I voted for Hillary Clinton,” he added. “I despised Donald Trump from the moment I learned of him. And my commitment in the 2016 election had much less to do with supporting him or his platform and a lot more to do with supporting Facebook’s commitment to democracy.”

Keep telling yourself that.

President Donald Trump hosted a previously undisclosed dinner with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel at the White House in October, the company told NBC News on Wednesday.

[...]

Zuckerberg also gave a speech at Georgetown University the week before, detailing his company’s commitment to free speech, and its resistance to calls for the company to crack down on misinformation in political advertisements.

[...]

It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and [Facebook board member Peter] Thiel discussed.

[...]

The dinner was the second meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in a month. Zuckerberg also met with the president in the Oval Office during a September visit to the capital.

  NBC

Gee...let me think...what could they be talking about?

A major donor to Trump’s campaign, Thiel is also the chairman of Palantir, a private data technology company that has become one of the largest recipients of government defense contracts with the United States government since Trump took office.

Thiel famously bankrolled an invasion of privacy lawsuit that effectively bankrupted the gossip website Gawker. Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown, which he delivered on the same trip in which he met with Trump, was titled “Standing for Voice and Free Expression.”

Probably never batted an eye at the contradiction.

On Wednesday, Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook toured an Apple manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas.

Trump and Cook have maintained a very public working relationship as the Apple CEO seeks to keep Apple products exempt from the president’s tariffs on China.

What's the quid pro quo?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Sorry, I can't get to the WSJ because it's behind a pay wall.  If I find another article that quotes more of it, I'll post below.

UPDATE:

Another point in Mark Zuckerberg's creepiness

Also in Facebook news:

In Menlo Park, an affluent, mostly white city of 35,000, Facebook at one point paid workers not to live in lower-income neighborhoods near the company’s headquarters. And now, there's a police unit that is funded by Facebook to patrol the area surrounding its campus. The bill comes in at over $2 million annually—big money in a small city.

[...]

“You create a danger when you have public servants being privately funded,” J.T. Faraji, an East Palo Alto resident and founder of the activist group Real Community Coalition, told Motherboard. “It becomes the privatization of the law, and the law is supposed to work for everyone. To me, that’s a major breakdown in the system. It should be illegal for private corporations to have their own police force.”

[...]

The “Facebook Unit,” as it was nicknamed by Menlo Park police, has not gotten much attention outside of these communities, despite being one of the nation’s only privately-funded public police forces.

Public records obtained by Motherboard—hundreds of pages of notes, proposals in draft and final form, presentations, and emails between Facebook and the Menlo Park Police Department over several years—provide an unprecedented look at how the partnership was forged and how it operates, as well as at public concerns about law enforcement’s intimate ties to one of the most powerful technology companies in the world.

“This would be concerning to me as a community member,” said Chris Burbank of the Center for Policing Equity, a research consortium founded at the University of California-Los Angeles that focuses on transparency in law enforcement. “I don’t care who it is. You don’t get to buy a police department.”

  Vice

Apparently you do.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Not crazy about this

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg sent multiple emails to Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg’s campaign manager, with names of individuals that he might consider hiring, campaign spokesman Chris Meagher confirmed. Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife, also sent multiple emails to Schmuhl with staff recommendations. Ultimately, two of the people recommended were hired [Eric Mayefsky, senior digital analytics adviser, and Nina Wornhoff, organizing data manager].

[...]

Mayefsky worked at Facebook for almost four years starting in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. Wornhoff previously worked as a machine learning engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and in Democratic politics in Indiana, Buttigieg’s home state.

[...]

The communication was initiated by Zuckerberg and Chan, Meagher said. It was sent shortly after Buttigieg officially launched his campaign in mid-April.

[...]

A spokesman for the Zuckerberg-Chan family told Bloomberg News that the employees asked the tech mogul and Chan to recommend them

[...]

“Mark and Priscilla have not decided who to support for President,” he added..

[...]

Zuckerberg, 35, and Buttigieg, 37, overlapped at Harvard, and Buttigieg was friends with two of Zuckerberg’s roommates. He was also one of Facebook’s first 300 users. But they were only introduced years later by a mutual Harvard friend.

[...]

A number of other high-ranking Facebook executives, including David Marcus, the executive leading Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts, Naomi Gleit, one of Facebook’s longest-tenured executives, and Chris Cox, former chief product officer who is close friends with Zuckerberg, have donated to Buttigieg.

[...]

Elizabeth Warren, in particular, has repeatedly attacked Zuckerberg and Facebook over its decision not to fact check posts or ads shared by politicians.

[...]

In the past, Facebook embedded staffers with political campaigns to give them guidance on how to best use the social media platform. The 2016 Trump campaign said it greatly benefited from having Facebook staffers on hand. The company announced in 2018 that it would pull back from offering on-site support.

  Bloomberg

Little by little, I'm becoming less enamored of Pete Buttigieg.  And I'm sorry it's happening.

Meanwhile...

When do Zuckerberg and Bezos throw down?