“They’re too cozy with power.”
By Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver & Sarah Frier
Bloomberg (12/21/17)
Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald Trump accused Facebook of bias.
Zuckerberg’s social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.
The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team that’s neutral in that it works with nearly anyone seeking or securing power. The unit is led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since Facebook hired Harbath three years later, her team has traveled the globe helping political clients use the company’s powerful digital tools.
Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most controversial political movements while resisting transparency.
Zuckerberg’s social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.
The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team that’s neutral in that it works with nearly anyone seeking or securing power. The unit is led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since Facebook hired Harbath three years later, her team has traveled the globe helping political clients use the company’s powerful digital tools. …
- Mark “We’ll work with anyone” Zuckerberg Under Fire For Facebook’s Deal With Rodrigo Duterte – Beat special report on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, “fake news” and how Rodrigo Duterte deployed the “Putin playbook” using the platform. Melber’s message for Mark Zuckerberg: “Working with anyone and everyone to make money is not good for democracy.” Link to 10+-Minute Video
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
*****
The Russian Facebook Scandal Damages The Left As Much As The Right
The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process.
By Thomas Frank
The Guardian (12/27/17)
December is the month for retrospectives about the year’s most interesting news stories, and my nominee is the tale of the Russian Facebook advertisements, which burned across front pages a few months ago.
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
“Russian Facebook as the great under-examined political story of 2017: it had the potential to destroy the freedom fantasies of both sides simultaneously.”
Take a moment to look up some of these false-flag proclamations — the ones produced for Facebook pages such as “Being Patriotic”, “Secured Borders” or “Army of Jesus”. They are nothing like the polished and scientifically tested Madison Avenue products that once alarmed our parents’ generation. This was low-budget stuff: ugly, loud and stupid — hectoring declarations in brightly colored script over stock photographs.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
Which is to say, these Russian Facebook ads were exactly the sort of thing that real American rightwingers have been whispering for decades. The particulars have changed over the years, but the panic these ads try to evoke is precisely the same as it was when the right first discovered it could raise money by scaring people about Panama Canal giveaways and scheming communists in Nicaragua.
My favorite of these, without a doubt, is the one that shows Jesus arm-wrestling Satan to settle the election (to make things clear, the caption tells us that “Hillary is a Satan”). You are urged to “help Jesus win” by “liking” it. It is cheaply slapped together, pious and casually blasphemous at the same time. In other words, it is perfect. …
If you are concerned about the future of the Democratic party and the future of progressive reforms and progress and wonder how we have come to the precipice we are at in America, read Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal”.
