Last year, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson made an interesting prediction. According to Ferguson, “Silicon Valley is never going to let 2016 happen again.” He was talking about the presidential election victory by Donald Trump. The latest in a series of exposes by James O’Keefe and the Project Veritas crew seems to validate that prediction.
Tag: Facebook
In an open letter posted at Medium, a self-described Republican who works at Google warned about the ideological turmoil and rampant bias in the supposedly nonpartisan Big Tech firm.
You don’t have to be a fan of controversial, fringe Infowars at all, for example, to be concerned about the implications for free speech. The latest bans, which also includes independent journalist Laura Loomer, appears to be a warm-up act by social media platforms for future censorship of mainstream conservatives, populists, and libertarians heading into the 2020 election.
Congressman Devin Nunes is suing Twitter for defamation in a filing that he says is the first of many. Nunes, a California Republican who headed the House Intelligence Committee (which made him a target of the far left or alt left), is seeking money damages totaling $250 million (a trendy number) for defamation from the social media network, among other forms of requested relief. He also maintains that Twitter shadow-banned him and others. Although the president has spoken about and tweeted about social network bias, neither the Trump administration or possibly compromised GOP lawmakers collectively have taken any substantive steps to address against social media censorship as yet. Nunes has taken the matter into his own hands.
Do you ever wonder if anything is on the level? Sometimes when you look below the surface, things turn out to be kayfabe, to borrow that professional wrestling slang.
In the social media context, Big Tech including Facebook has repeatedly denied it is censoring right-of-center thought despite evidence otherwise.
Now it appears that Facebook, a platform that some have derisively nicknamed Fakebook, may have drastically inflated its audience metrics.
From CNBC:
“Facebook knew that it was providing inaccurate data on ad viewership for over a year before telling clients in 2016, according to an updated lawsuit filed on Tuesday. And the problem was much worse than what Facebook reported. In September 2016, Facebook admitted the that it overestimated video ad viewing time averages by up to 60 percent to 80 percent for two years because of a calculation error. According to the lawsuit, which a group of small social media agencies and marketing consultants initially filed in a California court October 2016, Facebook wasn’t sharing the whole picture. The plaintiffs claim that Facebook inflated ad viewing time averages by 150 percent to 900 percent, much higher than reported. When Facebook discovered the issue, it stalled fixing it for more than a year while it came up with a plan to make it seem like it wasn’t a big problem, the lawsuit says.”
Author, filmmaker, and journalist Mike Cernovich, who says he spent six figures to beef up his Facebook video presence but without much return in terms of conversion (i.e., moving product to followers) despite “millions of views,” says he is bringing his own lawsuit against the massive social network.
“I spent over $100,000 on video for my Facebook page based on the false viewer numbers Facebook provided. This is civil fraud and my lawsuit will be filed shortly. I will also be filing a complaint with the [Federal Trade Commission],” Cernovich wrote on Twitter.
Anyone who invested in a multi media team with Facebook has a lawsuit. Strong ones. California law is the strictest in the country for civil fraud.
I even expect Buzzfeed and other outlets to sue. These are big money cases for the lawyers involved, too. https://t.co/9bl9l8nQw6
About 100 bold Facebook employees have stepped forward to align themselves with a group calling for ideological rather than merely cosmetic diversity.
In an unusually fair story, The New York Times reported on this development.
“The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled ‘We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,’ it quickly took off inside the social network. ‘We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,’ Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. ‘We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.’ Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB’ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group’s page and who were not authorized to speak publicly. The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.”
The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social network. https://t.co/aHEZ09cRSh
Much has written about accusations that the progressive tech giants (a.k.a. Big Data or Big Social) are censoring politically conservative, populist, or libertarian websites and individuals (or those perceived as harboring leanings of that nature) through methods such as the algorithm changes, or shadow banning, throttling, de-platforming, and de-monetization, or artificially trending or not trending certain content.
Mainstream influencers on the right have from time to time also seen their accounts suspended for transgressions pursuant to standards that don’t seem to apply to their left-wing counterparts.
Parenthetically, Big Social lined up behind the now-repealed net neutrality but as far as content neutrality, not so much.
A study of 50 online publishers released in March by The Western Journal concluded that modifications to Facebook’s news feeds sent conservative publishers’ reader engagement into a nose dive far more than liberals. The Outline came up with similar findings after Facebook apparently adjusted the news feeds to de-emphasize content from news outlets.
A recent Pew Research Center poll indicates that a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum perceive that the big tech platforms are censoring political views with which they disagree.
While praising Facebook as a key to the Trump presidential election victory, digital guru and 2020 Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale explained the following to the Bloomberg news agency.
“Facebook is a liberal company…that has an inherent bias…that is based in a place that is probably extremely biased…their employees have biases, and those decisions probably go into every line of code they write and everything they do…I think the inherent bias in those companies is significant.”
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale says Facebook and Twitter have liberal biases https://t.co/ghSmZiVITF pic.twitter.com/903HTmQsJd
— Bloomberg (@business) July 17, 2018
In the interview with a Russia-obsessed Bloomberg reporter (is there another kind of journalist these days?), Parscale also implied that unlike the other platforms, he thinks that Facebook is trying to take steps to eliminate liberal bias and that he intends to hold all the major tech firms accountable for fairness.
Parscale has sat down with Facebook officials personally to discuss various issues including the application programming interface. Watch the interview clip below.
In recent Capitol Hill testimony, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Silicon Valley is an extremely very left-leaning place, but denied that his company is censoring conservatives.
Apart from Trump’s twitter feed, Parscale implied that Twitter is inconsequential as a persuasion vehicle.
This may be the result of Twitter being dominated by a far-left social justice thought-police cohort ready to pounce on any opinion that doesn’t fit within the progressive agenda.
Parscale also revealed that Google-owned YouTube will play a bigger role in the 2020 Trump reelection campaign than int 2016. As Parscale noted in the interview, YouTube has, however, also come under criticism for liberal bias in terms of of the way it indexes conservative-leaning videos.
Yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Aspen Security Forum that China (not Russia) is the most significant threat to the U.S. in terms of economic espionage as well as traditional espionage.
In a Capitol Hill hearing about online content filtering on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) asked three robotic, talking-points-memorizing Facebook, Google, and Twitter officials about nations other than Russia that might have meddled in U.S. elections. See clip below.
At that hearing, a Facebook official admitted “that Russian election interference was limited to ‘a few thousand’ of two billion posts analyzed, Breitbart News reported.
You may recall that Gohmert blew up the Peter Strzok hearing last week when he alluded to the witness’s extra-curricular activities.
“This is intolerable harassment of a witness!”
Former lifelong liberal Brandon Straka has kicked off a grassroots social media effort to encourage others to exit the Democratic Party and the left in general.
He has created a Facebook platform for what he calls the “unsilent minority” which is accompanied by the #WalkAway hashtag on Twitter.
Starting with his recent powerful video that went viral, Straka has created companion Facebook platforms for the The Unsilent Minority and the Walk Away Campaign for others to share their own similar messages and ideological experiences.
In
a companion video
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