I believe one of the Democrat-leaning newspapers in the US compiles a list of lies by Donald Trump. I really think we should be doing one for Facebook, as it would make for impressive reading, though it would also take some time to compile.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he talked to media from âacross the spectrumâ, but as The Interceptâs Jon Schwarz and Sam Biddle discovered, this is another lie: Zuckerberg cultivates relationships with US conservatives, not their liberals, based on the duoâs checks.
This adds fuel to the fire that Zuckerberg dreads US senator Elizabeth Warren getting into the White House, and has said so, and we know the buck really stops with him when it comes to Facebookâs activities. Facebook even pulled Sen. Warren’s ads from their platform briefly: so much for impersonal algorithms, ‘We’re just a platform,’ and free speech. We also know from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezâs questioning of the Facebook founder that he claims he passes the buck on what media are considered legit to a conservative group, something heâll have sanctioned, so be prepared to see Facebook reflect his (and Trump-supporting, Facebook board member Peter Thielâs) right-wing political views.
As Schwarz and Biddle also note, Facebookâs VP for US public policy is a George W. Bush aide and a board member for the former presidentâs museum.
Jack Morse at Mashable, meanwhile, reported that Zuckerberg is attempting historical revisionism on why he started Facebook. Retconning might work with comic books but less so in real life. Apparently, instead of the truthâa website which scraped photos of students and asked people to rate who was hotterâFacebook is now something created to give people a voice after the Iraq war in 2003.
Sorry, Mark, we know you didnât have such noble intentions, regardless of what they eventually became.
Itâs an insult to all those entrepreneurs who actually did start businesses or ventures with noble intent or socially responsible purposes.
Frankly, sticking to the truth, and saying you discovered the power of connecting people, is a far more compelling story.
Except, of course, Facebook no longer connects people. It divides people by validating their own biases, including less savoury viewpoints. It stokes outrage because that’s worth more clicks and time spent on its site. At worst, itâs a tool used for genocide. It’s a shame Facebook refuses to acknowledge the Pandora’s box it has opened, because its top management has no desire to do a thing about it. And as such it loses my respect even further. Don’t want the likes of Warren calling for breaking your company up? The solution is actually quite simple, but you all have become too rich and too establishment to want to break things.
I actually had to write this in my opâed for Lucireâs 22nd anniversary last week: âIn this respect, we see our mission as the opposite of social media: we want to bring people together, not usher them into silos and echo chambers.â The narrative Facebook wishes to spin, like so many in its past, is an easily seen-through joke.
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffsâa group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social networkâsettled.
Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, âThe suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. âThe average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,â stated an amended complaint.â
Facebook denies this and settled for US$40 million, which is really pocket change for the multi-milliard-dollar company. Just the price of doing business.
Remember, Facebook has been shown to have lied about the number of people it can reach (it now admits that its population estimates have no basis in, well, the population), so Iâm not surprised it lies about the number of people who watch their videos. And remember their platform has a lot of botsâI still have several thousand reported on Instagram that have yet to be touchedâand Facebook itself isnât exactly clean.
Every time they get called out, there are a few noises, but nothing ever really happens.
This exchange between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Zuckerberg is a further indication that nothing will ever happen at Facebook to make things rightâthere’s no will from top management for that to happen. Thereâs too much to be lost with monetization opportunities for questionable services to be shut down, while Facebook is all too happy to close ones that donât make money (e.g. the old âView asâ feature). The divisions and “fake news” will continue, the tools used by all the wrong people.
It’s your choice whether you want to be part of this.
"So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no."
Complete exchange between @RepAOC@AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today's House Financial Services Cmte hearing.
That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, donât you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!
Strictly speaking, I realize it was Book Antiqua, though as we all know, that’s a Palatino clone.
Since even English types like Baskerville were influenced by what was happening on the Continent, for official use, the UK really needs to go back to Old English. And yes, I realize that suggestion has unpleasant parallels to what was going on in Germany in the 1930s âŠ
There was a great follow-up to my Tweet, incidentally:
I need a "Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!" tee shirt, and I do not even wear clothes with writing on them.
When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipediaâs abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform.
One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, and was probably deserving of a page detailing his notoriety. Cross, as I detailed in May 2018, is a person or entity that is anti-Jeremy Corbyn and favourable toward right-wing figures. He ‘has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.’ Wikipediaâs reaction? Delete the page, and subject its creator to a lifetime ban. Then, any record of the Philip Cross page was scrubbed cleanâforget page histories. The story is detailed at Off-Guardian here.
In other words, Wikipedia was complicit in biased editing. I’ve been saying Wikipedia was questionable for over a decade, but to actually protect someone who engages in what some might call libel?
It’s entirely consistent with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’s attitude to the whole thing, as Craig Murray detailed at the time.
After five years of Cross’s inputs to Wikipedia, he was finally discussed by Wikipedia by a principled editor, KalHolmann, though not without opposition (KalHolmann was initially “punished” for even bringing it up). Like all big sites, Wikipedia decided to show people that it has some form of governance only after it had been outed (including a BBC World Service radio story that went out during the arbitration process) for allowing abuse.
And by means of a postscript to these events of mid-2018 that I missed till now, George Galloway, a regular target of Philip Cross’s Wikipedia activity, claims he has identified the man, and knows the background behind him.
Iâm wondering whether itâs worth carrying on with Feedburner. Over the last few years Iâve rid our sites of Facebook gadgetsâthat means if you âFacebook likedâ something here, youâd have to go through the Po.st links above (which Iâm hoping are visible on the mobile version), rather than something made by Facebook that could track you. Itâs not been 100 per cent perfect, since Po.st doesnât pick up on likes and shares that you get within Facebook, so if this post manages a dozen likes there, the count you see above wonât increase by 12. Itâs why well liked posts donât necessarily have a high share count, which renders the figure you see here irrelevant.
I suppose itâs better that someone understates the share figure than overstates itâas Facebook does with its user numbers.
But I dislike Google’s tracking as much as Facebook’s, and since I have de-Googled everywhere else (one of the last is shown below), then I’d like to get rid of the remaining Google tools I use.
I signed this blog up to Feedburner when the company was independent of Google, but I see from the gadget on the full desktop version of this site there are only 37 of you who use its feeds from this blog. This is a far cry from the 400-plus I used to see regularly, even 500-plus at one point in the late 2000s.
I checked in to my Feedburner stats lately, and was reminded that the drop from hundreds to dozens all happened one day in 2014, and my follower numbers have been in the two digits since. Check out this graphic and note the green line:
Itâs entirely consistent with what I witnessed over the years. There were indeed days when the Feedburner gadgetâs count would drop into the 30s, before rising back up to 400 or so the following day. I never understood why there would be these changes: in the early days of Feedburner, before the Google acquisition in 2007, I had a slow and steady rise in followers. These peaked soon after Google took over, plateaued, and just before the 2010s began, the massive fluctations began.
I canât believe thereâd be en masse sign-ups and cancellations over a five-year period, but in 2014, the last fall happened, and it remained low. And, to be frank, itâs somewhat demoralizing. Is the fall due to Google itself, or that Feedburner decided to run a check on email addresses and found that the majority were fake one day, or something else?
Given that the fluctations were happening for years, then I want to say there was a bug that knocked out hundreds of subscribers, but I actually donât know, and I havenât read anything on this online, despite searching for it.
Perhaps Google cuts back the dissemination of your RSS feed if youâre not using their Blogger product, but we know why using their service is an exceptionally bad idea.
It reminds me of Facebookâs decision to kill the shares from a page by 90 per cent some years back, to force people to pay to keep their pages in the feed.
If youâre getting this on Feedburner, would you mind leaving me a comment so I know itâs still worthwhile? Otherwise, I may remove my accountâIâve de-Googled everything elseâand if you still need Atom and RSS feeds, they can be had at jackyan.com/blog/atom/ and jackyan.com/blog/feed/ respectively.
