Zuckerberg on Facebook bias
I didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony yesterday, and I didn’t read a transcript of it, either. But I did read several summaries, and I’m in agreement with what John Hinderaker writes here:
Zuckerberg responded by acknowledging”“remarkably, I think”“that Silicon Valley “is an extremely left-leaning place.” But he denied any knowledge of the political views of Facebook’s 15,000 or more content reviewers, and said that he personally is committed to making Facebook’s platform accessible to people of all political stripes.
That might be true. But, as usual when Congressmen and Senators question witnesses, the initial question wasn’t followed up. If Facebook is a neutral forum, open to all, then why were Diamond and Silk banned”“on the absurd ground that they are “unsafe to the community””“simply because they support the President of the United States? If Facebook were motivated only by profit, it wouldn’t suppress a page that has more than a million followers. Obviously, this was an act of left-wing political activism. But no one at today’s hearing asked what Zuckerberg is doing to prevent such leftist bias from infecting his company.
That was my take as well. I even had a bit of an argument with someone yesterday about it, and my position was: if Zuckerberg knew from the start about the overwhelmingly left-wing bias of his hires, and he had them banning people for supposedly objective reasons, and he’s dedicated to not discriminating politically, what on earth did he do to prevent it from happening? Is it news to him that it’s been happening for quite some time? What else did he expect? Is he that out of it? Does he have such poor control over what goes on with Facebook? Or is he lying, and he just doesn’t care? Or is his own political bias operating, too?
Facebook can exercise its leftist bias if it likes; after all, it’s a private company. But if Zuckerberg is really dedicated to having Facebook treat the political sides equally—only banning obviously egregious outliers like terrorists or people who threaten to shoot up schools—then he should have been doing something about the bias a long, long time ago.
Silicon Valley seems to be filled with nerds who are so convinced of their superior intelligence and think they are deserving of of any money they can make anyway. They all need to take a year of and work night shift at a convenience store and get to know parts of the real world.
OK, I’ll go ahead and say what’s obvious.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are monopolies. All are also politically far left. If they admit that they’re using monopoly power to further leftist causes and suppress conservatives and Republicans, then they risk the wrong kind of government intervention, so they lie through their teeth and deny political bias.
They hope for regulations that would suppress competition even further. They fear that they’ll be forced to break up their companies. I’d like to see that, but am not sure how it would work. In any event, Congress doesn’t want to break the companies up. Neither do they care about privacy. That only became an issue when Facebook data was used by someone with the wrong kind of political views.
For both Congress and Zuckerberg, the question is what can they do to take advantage of the moment. Aside from a few people like Ted Cruz, they all want the same thing. How can they make it look like something’s been done, when in fact their advantages have been further cemented? A deal will be made that will serve their interests, not the interests of those few consumers and voters who truly want more privacy and less political bias.
You would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to believe Zuckerberg means a single word of his desire to be open and welcoming of diversity of thought. This is a guy who lives behind walls patrolled by armed guards and buys up properties around his various homes to ensure his privacy while asking the serfs to believe he cares about their privacy or wants to provide a platform for diverse opions.
I have some tropical ocean front property in Iowa if he wants a home in flyover country. Him and the private jet he flew into DC on.
Nothing will happen to Facebook. Congress has been bought by Facebook’s lobbyists. Protection racket.
Unless they get really ham handed about it, nothing will happen. Eventually the Left will resort to such obvious tyrannical actions that further tolerance equals acceptance of enslavement. At that point, “politics by other means” will be the only alternative. Totalitarian ideologies have no other path by which to operate.
Of course he lied, he was not under oath so he had no reason to be honest. He also is well aware of the tilt, but he doesn’t see it as bias, he considers it to be middle of the road after all he helped shape the Milt Romney Memes of 2012, Milt can be called many things but a far right candidate is not one of them.
It takes about a million. We are out there. Hammers, blades, 22 LRs, etc. Recon and patience. Figure it out people. Once you do it is not difficult. I am a senior citizen, but I have my wits and knowledge.
Once you realize they want you and yours dead, you become free. That day is on your event horizon. Prepare to defend yourself. Take comfort, they need 30,000,000 to monitor, identify, and police you. They do not have the numbers.
Jefe…I watched that particular part of the lizard-man’s testimony. I thought Senator Cruz followed that up as well as any would have in that setting. He did list the dozens of conservative posters to FB who have been shut down & specifically asked about D & S. Not sure what Hinderaker saw or didn’t see that I did…but given the Senators have almost ALL been bought & paid for by FB it’s just kabuki anyway.
Read the main article, then the comment linked here.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2018/04/11/the-other-side-gets-a-vote/#comment-525497
Now, what comes next?
Leftists can cry out for mercy when they are weak, but the moment they get the edge of power, they will declare “no prisoners taken” policy… hehe.
My solution to this is to use the anti-trust laws to break up Facebook into at least four separate equal sized companies. Zuckerberg would be forced to completely divest himself of any interest in three of them. Each company would also be forced to give users a choice in how they can use the service. One choice would be as subscription service with absolutely no sale of any information to outside parties. The other would be as a free service with sale of very limted personal information to outside parties and a payment and notice to the user by Facebook Junior each time the information is sold.
Each Facebook Junior would be free to have its own internal Ministry of Truth that banned certain points of view but would have to deal with competition from the other three. At least one of the others would quickly figure out that there is a large market that is being shunned by the MoT and go after it.
The politicians should like this since there are now four large companies that can donate to their campaigns instead of one. Everyone wins!
But he denied any knowledge of the political views of Facebook’s 15,000 or more content reviewers, and said that he personally is committed to making Facebook’s platform accessible to people of all political stripes.
not quite…
1) would they hire someone who has not been on their platform and so exposed their internal self?
2) in another question asked of him on hiring, he said “generally” implying they DO look at such (but probably for only managers as that would take care of the rest without a specific “order”)
Somewhat off topic to Neo:
I tried to make a donation to your website the other day.
Having worked in I.T. For more than 4 decades it is important to me to stay anonymous. To that end I used cash to purchase a pre-paid Credit Card. Then I attempted to use it to donate to your website.
I understand the need for the credit card number, expiration date and CCV. When prompted for my email address, name, Home address, Home phone number and/or wireless phone number I left them blank. My donation attempt did not work.
I don’t trust Facebook to keep my personal information secure. In fact I don’t even have an account.
I don’t trust google to keep my personal information secure. So my gmail account ‘details’ are purposely ‘fudged’.
While I trust YOU I do not trust your hosting company nor payment processsor to keep my personal information secure. Until I can make a totally anonymous donation I guess I’ll be a squatter.
Neo, Facebook, with stock symbol FB, is not a “private company”, unless you mean to contrast non-government with government. FB is a publicly-traded company. Its Board has fiduciary responsibilities to its owners, the shareholders (of which Zuck is of course #1).
> Unless they get really ham handed about it, nothing will happen
They are being ham-handed about it, otherwise most people probably wouldn’t have noticed. This is the new normal. The government won’t help, and why should we expect it to. It’s usually the cause of the problems in the first place, and almost always makes the situation worse when it tries to “help”.
There are a number of alternatives to Facebook out there, but I don’t know if it’s possible for any of them to get enough of a critical mass of users to make a difference.
I would like to see Facebook and other mediums of internet communications/commerce be upfront about their business model.
Like: “We collect any and all information you put up on your page. It is valuable and we turn that value into a profit for us. Other parties may use the information to your detriment, but that is just the risk you assume when you sign on with our service. We have no responsibility for any harm to you. In using our service you agree this is okay.”
Also: “Our ideals are progressive or libertarian or conservative or alt-right (as the case maybe) in nature. Any and all content that doesn’t reflect our ideals will be censored, blocked, or reported to state authorities. By using our service you agree that this is okay.”
I call it truth in advertising. Well, I can dream can’t I?
Frog:
Yes, private as opposed to non-government, not private as opposed to public.
And certainly not “private” in the sense of keeping your information private!
Tuvea:
I understand, and I thank you for the effort. I’ve tried to figure out a good way to handle it, and I haven’t come up with anything so far. Privacy has become a bigger and bigger issue.
I came late to FB, and joined reluctantly, but thought I probably should in order to have somewhat of a public profile to help sell any new books. Also at that time a few people I knew by then rarely used email, preferring to communicate via FB msg’ing.
I think that was in 2015. Something that immediately struck me was how many questions FB kept asking and re-asking about my life history and where I’d worked. Then I came to see this as somewhat useful, as I was seeking to organize my memories in any case to write a memoir/autobiographical novel, and all the prompts made me think about all the jobs I’d had when I was young.
Well, there’s more, but I’m not going to write a long feature, although I have some thoughts.
Zuckerberg seems like he’s a real creep.
“You ain’t seen bad yet, but it’s comin’.”
https://youtu.be/-TsUyc_DK38?t=2m24s
“Honesty’s praised, then left to freeze…”
…and about the same with regard to avoiding bias…
I think the problem with “bias” is that when you have been steeped in leftist thinking all your life, you can’t see your biases any more than a fish can see the water he lives in.
I would imagine that a lot of people exercising what reasonable people see as egregious bias don’t see it that way at all, and in some cases literally can’t see it this way. They’ve lived such an intellectually sheltered life that they can’t imagine people could think differently, so when they encounter it, it’s reasonable (to them) to believe this different thinking is aberrant, if not outright evil.
Hillary Clinton on Facebook and Zuckerberg, Nov 2019
“Mark Zuckerberg should pay a price for what he is doing to our democracy,” said Hillary Clinton. “Part of our problem, those of us who are appalled by this war on truth and this fake news which is truly surrounding us these days, is we’re not very good at combating it. It’s hard because you’re up against algorithms, plus all these other powerful forces, it’s really hard.”
“I can’t draw any conclusions about closed door meetings, not only with Trump but with Tucker Carlson and with Breitbart and with many others that have been going on at Facebook headquarters,” said Clinton. “But if I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I might suggest that there seems to be some connection…I don’t understand the mindset that we currently see operating with Zuckerberg.”
https://variety.com/2019/politics/news/hillary-clinton-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fake-ads-1203390944/
Nov 2019 – I am a FB employee. Zuckerberg gives internal Q&As each week. I can tell you that compared to the Gen-X and Millennial SJWs that work there, he’s the voice of reason. They are loud and angry and dominate the Q&As. They are particularly upset about the “news tab” feature that is now debuting (e.g., it includes Breitbart) and the new no-censor policy for political ads.