The Facebook Whistleblower (1 Viewer)

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    GrandAdmiral

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    Wasn't sure if this needed to be included in the social media thread or not. I didn't think so because there's just so many different layers that includes the misinformation we covered in that thread. This seems much different in that we have a Facebook employee providing details. Plus, she is using Facebook's own research and data to show Facebook has been lying all along (who's surprised by that) and are making a targeted effort at our children. Could we finally see Congress come together to tackle this problem?
     
    Here are some interesting parts of his article:

    The story of Haugen — guided by a communications firm of former Barack Obama aide Bill Burton and financed by my former boss, eBay billionaire and Intercept owner Pierre Omidyar — is being told in drip-drip fashion by this “consortium” of would-be media competitors, who are coordinating in Slack for maximum effect.

    ...Commercial news outlets, not Facebook, have been the chief architects of the panic era. They’ve spent six years now coaching Trump-era audiences to act like roulette addicts endlessly trying to win back a loss, begging them to stay at the table and just move their chips from one “existential threat” or “apocalypse” to the next. From Russiagate to Treason in Helsinki to kids in cages to Bountygate to the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 to the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and the “biggest threat against democracy since the Civil War,” audiences have fallen into a freakout and stayed there. They wake up knowing nothing, but by noon demand the biggest available policy weapon be fired in the shortest possible time frame, at problems they only just heard about, with the zero-to-defund trajectory of the George Floyd story typifying the pattern. Just as quickly, the same people forget and move on, trying on new terrors like shoes.

    Facebook is the latest target loaded into this moral mania machine, and one of the first to be mass-recycled. As one former Facebook executive pointed out to me, this is “2016 all over again,” as the company within days after that year’s presidential election was chosen to take the blame for the Democratic Party losing to a game show host and the commercial press failing to see Trump’s win coming, all amid the same howls about “misinformation” and “fake news.” The only difference this time is the presence of Haugen as a hook. As with all the panics of the period, the coverage arc has been defined by shoddy, superficial pack journalism in which the group picks simplistic narratives and sticks with them, come hell or high water, even if their own reporting contradicts it.

    ...I’ve been very critical of Facebook in the past for a variety of reasons, and even wrote a book, Hate Inc., that specifically addressed the phenomenon of hawking anger for profit. Unquestionably, algorithms on platforms like Facebook exacerbate the divisiveness problem. But Facebook is a lot less guilty than news companies like Murdoch’s Fox and Comcast-owned MSNBC, which not only make conscious decisions to profit off the riling up of audiences, but actually make the content that does it. Watch this incredible clip of Brian Stelter talking about the scandal on “Reliable Sources.” A spasm of pseudo-honesty hits him for a split-second as he asks his panel of chin-scratching media experts if maybe cable news also consciously shoves audiences in intellectual silos, saying, “Isn’t it true that traditional media’s house isn’t clean?”



    The “goals” aren’t hard to spot. From Democratic Party politicians like Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal to blue-party proxies like Omidyar to the conga line of ratings-freefalling legacy media figures in perpetual sad clown face over the stubborn popularity of conservative digital media, Facebook represents a wilderness of insufficiently regulated communication that needs humiliation and taming, good and hard. As a giant corporation led by an unpopular, on-spectrum billionaire loathed for different reasons on both the left and the right, it can be safely battered without too many tears shed.

    Make no mistake, though, the endgame is getting government — maybe through Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig’s creepy suggestion of a congressional “blue ribbon commission” — to bring the information the public sees on Facebook under more and more outside control, almost surely in the name of “safety.” The firm will be painted as a conspirator in the January 6th riots, a harmer of children, a promoter of hate speech, etc. Zuckerberg made the mistake of letting politicians in amid the last media panic of 2016-2017, helping kick off the online censorship era. He should tell these wannabe Stasi agents to take a hike this time. He might be surprised to find out how well that goes over.
     
    What do you suggest should happen to Facebook?

    Government intervention? That is a bad precedent to be setting. Especially for you Libertarians. But critical thinking isn’t really a prerequisite to susbscribe to conspiracy theories. Or libertarianism for that matter.
     
    Government can't even respond to natural disasters properly, them getting involved in facebook is an epic fail. Here is one example of why I wouldn't want Government touching facebook, even though I've been off facebook since 2013. I go back to FEMA and Ida aftermath, insurance company comes out and screws me on roof damage, its a 5%/10,000$ deductible. I go the Fema route, after explaining to the case worker that while yes, I have insurance, they're not paying a dime. Fema caseworker goes through a criteria of what needs to be met in order to qualify for housing assistance, one of them is not getting money from your insurance company, if you get any sort of money from the insurance company its an auto-deny. I nail all but one of the criteria's and that one she says doesn't apply to most people. I wrap up the phone call with the case worker, she tells me everything is in order and they'll review it and let me know. A few weeks go by, I get a letter of denial saying I have insurance and this is the reason why I was denied, even though I've explicitly told the case worker that insurance wasn't giving me a dime on my claim because I had around 9k in damage with a 10k deductible.

    I appeal the decision through disasterassistance.gov. I upload pictures of the insurance denial, do the extra mile of stuff to make my appeal as sound as possible. I get a text saying that I should then apply for SBA load through Fema since I was denied. I go through the arduous task of filling out that shirtshow that was beyond confusing. I get another text msg from someone I've never talked to before, we talk about the loan, she says she'll get back with me after checking some things out. Few days pass, I get a phone from a different person asking me about my 2020 tax return and how she can only find the 2019 one. I owed the government money in 2020 and they cashed the check in May. How in the crap she couldn't find my taxes?

    A week goes by, I get two separate letters in the mail from fema on the sameday at the same time. I shirt you not, one saying I was denied an SBA loan, the other saying I was approved for an SBA loan.(lol). Also, I am then told to go, ON THE SAME DAY, to go to the disaster assistance website and send more documents to get approved(AFTER THE APPROVAL LETTER). There was two documents with a red ! basically saying they needed something else from me. I noticed a number of a guy who I never talked to who is now apparently in charge of my case(What?) I call up, he assures me everything is in order and that an eye test inspection would be happening within 10 days to make sure I actually have the damage I've claimed.

    This past Friday, I check my bank account and notice I now have a deposit from Fema of 4,440.00$, I become uber confused as to what the hell is this. My case manager said the SBA loan is a max of 26,000$ and that it would need to past an eye test inspection first. So here I am, having a phantom 4,440.00$ deposit in my account. I tell myself I call up on Monday/Tuesday to see whats up. Yesterday morning, I get a text saying a FEMA inspector will be in the area and they want to come by. Me thinking its the SBA people, I say sure, just gimmie a date/time. Around 11am, she rolls up, I find out she's not from SBA, she's from disaster assistance(Really nice lady, very informative) she clears up some stuff that had never been explained at any point all throughout this process. Several things she observed was not listed in her pre-report that were found after she did her initial inspection. She tells me that the 4,440.00 is grant money that doesn't have to be paid back but if I get the SBA loan as well, everything including the 4,440.00$ has to be paid back along with the loan.

    Now I am grateful that I'm getting something from FEMA, don't get me wrong but I think I've spoken to four or five different people throughout this whole process and none of them were made aware of what each of them had done/told in previous sessions. Now imagine that shirtshow that is Government being involved in social media and how they run things, LOL.
     
    What do you suggest should happen to Facebook?

    Government intervention? That is a bad precedent to be setting. Especially for you Libertarians. But critical thinking isn’t really a prerequisite to susbscribe to conspiracy theories. Or libertarianism for that matter.
    The left is who wants to regulate Facebook to censor the views that they don't want. I'm calling attention to that. I'm not calling for Facebook to be regulated like the authoritarian left. I thought that was obvious.
     
    Evidently FB is hosting some efforts to influence the VA election:


    “This fake publication—and the hundreds of other such fakes out there, and the ads promoting them—are reminders of just how much money is mysteriously sloshing around on the hidden, fake-news, data-driven side of our politics.”

    FB is running ads for fake news sites, from a pro-Trump, conservative view.

    ‘It turns out that “Old Dominion News” is an example of what the Columbia Journalism Review calls a “pink slime” outlet, one among hundreds. The sites

    can be traced back to conservative businessman Brian Timpone. In 2012, Timpone’s company Journatic, an outlet known for its low-cost automated story generation (which became known as ‘pink slime journalism’), attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism. Journatic rebranded as Locality Labs in 2013; Locality Labs is behind many of the publications we discovered that mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations. These sites do not bear much information about their political use or funding, but some of them have been funded by political candidates and lobbying campaigns. Metric Media, Locality Labs (or LocalLabs), Franklin Archer, the Record Inc., and Local Government Information Services(LGIS) are the main organizations involved in operating these networks of publications, and Timpone is associated in one way or another with each of them. Michigan Daily has detailed the convoluted relationship between these organizations.’
     

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