Alex Jones and Infowars gets 'disappeared' - are we headed in the right direction?

[robvalue]

So that means they should be only 70% as offended each time

[Angrboda]

PBS Frontline airs two-part series on Facebook and how it ignored warnings about its impact on privacy and democracy

[Angrboda]

How Facebook and Twitter are rushing to stop voter suppression online for the midterm elections

Facebook and Twitter aren’t just trying to drive people to the polls — they’re racing to fight back bad actors who seek to deter their users from voting.

With the 2018 midterms days away, both social media platforms are waging a quiet war against fast-spreading falsehoods about how, when and where to vote — including posts containing inaccuracies about how to mail in ballots or doctored photos that show long lines at polling stations. To do so, they are taking aggressive steps to scan, vet and remove content that they see as a direct threat to democracy.

For Facebook and Twitter, the challenge is to ensure that false information about voting — potentially seeded by foreign governments or malicious domestic actors, then amplified by Web users unwittingly — does not serve to deter or intimidate voters on Nov. 6. Typically, these online giants shy away from correcting or removing false comments on their platforms, arguing that they are not arbiters of truth.

For example, Twitter users in recent weeks have fueled a rumor that federal immigration agents might be stationed at polling places across the country to check voters' citizenship statuses. “I hear ICE agents will be at polling stations on election day, looking to deport illegals trying to vote,” an Oct. 28 tweet said.

The post, which had gained little traction, was removed after The Washington Post contacted Twitter about it on Thursday. Experts fear such tweets could go viral and scare immigrants who are allowed to vote from casting ballots. (The Trump administration has said — on Twitter — that it does not conduct “enforcement operations at polling locations.”)

But both tech companies are proceeding cautiously, trying to find the right balance between combating perceived voter suppression and preserving free expression. “STOP VOTER FRAUD WEAR A ICE HAT ON ELECTION DAY,” suggested another tweet that was still viewable on Twitter as of Friday.

Facebook and Twitter say they have fine-tuned their policies — and their algorithms — in a bid to thwart threats and misinformation around voting. Government officials also stress they are keeping watch, and many state election leaders and voting rights organizations say they have reported problematic posts to the companies.

Monitoring for misleading messages, however, is not an easy task — and the stakes for tech giants are sky-high after suspicious accounts with possible Russian ties used similar tactics during the 2016 election. On Twitter, they targeted their inaccurate voting information specifically to Hispanic, African American and LGBT voters, according to documents released by congressional lawmakers.

“We’re concerned there’s going to be misinformation,” said Jim Condos, the secretary of state for Vermont and the leader of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

The heightened oversight complements the get-out-to-vote reminders and other tools that will be available atop Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter’s timeline come Election Day. On Friday, Twitter announced it would display an election countdown and links to resources for users to learn more about their local candidates. Other companies, such as Snapchat and Spotify, similarly are encouraging their users to vote.

Attempts to depress turnout are hardly new: For decades, government officials have battled back anonymous snail-mail fliers and robo-calls that misled voters on the locations of their polling places or the date of the election. But voter suppression increasingly has become more of a digital scourge — from robo-texts en masse to viral photos and videos in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

“Technology has made that information delivery more efficient and cheap, therefore potentially much more widespread,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “And it has made it more difficult for people to detect.”

Facebook this year has set up a special reporting channel for state election officials to flag voting misinformation for review and removal. Behind the scenes, it also has implemented its machine-learning tools to scan for obviously duplicitous content, including posts that share the wrong date of the election, a company official said Friday.

Under rules it revised in October, Facebook has banned an even broader swath of content, including posts that wrongly claim that people can vote online. And the company has said it would send some posts — including incorrect claims about long lines at polling places — for fact checkers to review, the official added. If they are found to be false, Facebook has said it will limit their reach in users’ news feeds.

"We don’t know on the front end if something is an innocent mistake. We don’t know on the front end if someone thinks they’re being funny. We don’t know on the front end if it’s part of a larger misinformation campaign,” said Amy Cohen, the group’s executive director. “But we’re focused on addressing the misinformation, regardless of the messenger.”

[Angrboda]

NY Times || Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos’s briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.

The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook’s reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook’s cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform.

---

Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, and Ms. Sandberg, 49, remain at the company’s helm, while Mr. Stamos and other high-profile executives have left after disputes over Facebook’s priorities.

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But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire.

Then Donald J. Trump ran for president. He described Muslim immigrants and refugees as a danger to America, and in December 2015 posted a statement on Facebook calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States. Mr. Trump’s call to arms — widely condemned by Democrats and some prominent Republicans — was shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, an illustration of the site’s power to spread racist sentiment.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Ms. Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook’s terms of service.

The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg’s domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook’s chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.

Some at Facebook viewed Mr. Trump’s 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform. But Ms. Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Mr. Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Ms. Sandberg had recruited as the company’s head of global policy management. Ms. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office — particularly to Mr. Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions.

In video conference calls between the Silicon Valley headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company’s terms of service to see if the post, or Mr. Trump’s account, violated Facebook’s rules.

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In the final months of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Russian agents escalated a yearlong effort to hack and harass his Democratic opponents, culminating in the release of thousands of emails stolen from prominent Democrats and party officials.

Facebook had said nothing publicly about any problems on its own platform. But in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Mr. Stamos.

Mr. Stamos’s team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees. Months later, as Mr. Trump battled Hillary Clinton in the general election, the team also found Facebook accounts linked to Russian hackers who were messaging journalists to share information from the stolen emails.

Mr. Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it.

Mr. Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016, after Mr. Zuckerberg publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Mr. Trump, Mr. Stamos — alarmed that the company’s chief executive seemed unaware of his team’s findings — met with Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg and other top Facebook leaders.

Ms. Sandberg was angry. Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally. Other executives asked Mr. Stamos why they had not been told sooner.

Still, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos’s work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos’s original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings.

But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump.

If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.

Ms. Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Mr. Zuckerberg — who spent much of 2017 on a national “listening tour,” feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota — did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it was published that April, the word “Russia” never appeared.

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Mr. Stretch and Mr. Stamos went into more detail with the audit committee than planned, warning that Facebook was likely to find even more evidence of Russian interference.

The disclosures set off Mr. Bowles, who after years in Washington could anticipate how lawmakers might react. He grilled the two men, occasionally cursing, on how Facebook had allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference. He demanded to know why it had taken so long to uncover the activity, and why Facebook directors were only now being told.

When the full board gathered later that day at a room at the company’s headquarters reserved for sensitive meetings, Mr. Bowles pelted questions at Facebook’s founder and second-in-command. Ms. Sandberg, visibly unsettled, apologized. Mr. Zuckerberg, stone-faced, whirred through technical fixes, said three people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings.

Later that day, the company’s abbreviated blog post went up. It said little about fake accounts or the organic posts created by Russian trolls that had gone viral on Facebook, disclosing only that Russian agents had spent roughly $100,000 — a relatively tiny sum — on approximately 3,000 ads.

---

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”

Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network came out in favor of a bill called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which made internet companies responsible for sex trafficking ads on their sites.

Google and others had fought the bill for months, worrying it would set a cumbersome precedent. But the sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook.

Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies, hoping the move would help repair relations on both sides of the aisle, said two congressional staffers and three tech industry officials.

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In March, The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian prepared to publish a joint investigation into how Facebook user data had been appropriated by Cambridge Analytica to profile American voters. A few days before publication, The Times presented Facebook with evidence that copies of improperly acquired Facebook data still existed, despite earlier promises by Cambridge executives and others to delete it.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg met with their lieutenants to determine a response. They decided to pre-empt the stories, saying in a statement published late on a Friday night that Facebook had suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. The executives figured that getting ahead of the news would soften its blow, according to people in the discussions.

They were wrong. The story drew worldwide outrage, prompting lawsuits and official investigations in Washington, London and Brussels. ... Facebook scrambled anew. Executives quietly shelved an internal communications campaign, called “We Get It,” meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018.

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

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Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.

He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist “menace” with “neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions.”

Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros’s family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros’s son. (An official at Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.)

Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro-Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook.

[CapnAwesome]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/gazette.com...7.amp.html

Alex Jones videos are getting the same amount of views on Facebook as before the ban. They are just deseminated differently.

Not to mention that traffic to his site is at an all time high: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com, twice what it was before his ban.

I don't know why people think you can ban an idea. It literally has never worked. Like prohibitions of drugs or alcohol, prohibitions of ideas just makes them spread.

[GUBU]

I don't know why people think you can ban an idea. It literally has never worked. Like prohibitions of drugs or alcohol, prohibitions of ideas just makes them spread.

The left isn't in the game of banning ideas. That leads to stagnation, a goal ofthe right.

[The Grand Nudger]

Alex Jones sells lead pills and super man bone broth, not ideas.

[Angrboda]

Without Any Explanation, Twitter Reinstates Jesse Kelly’s Account

Two days after Twitter permanently suspended an account belonging to Jesse Kelly, a senior contributor to The Federalist and conservative talk radio host, the social media publisher reinstated his account without any explanation.

On Sunday, Kelly’s account was taken down and he received a message from Twitter support saying that his account was taken down due to “repeat violations of the Twitter rules.” The social media publisher provided no additional information about which rules Kelly, a Marine combat veteran, had supposedly violated. Throughout the two years Kelly had a verified account, he had never received so much as a warning about any of his tweets leading up to the suspension that was supposed to be permanent.

Following his suspension, The Federalist’s Ben Domenech reported that Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey lied under oath to Congress when testifying in a hearing about the social media platform’s inconsistent and controversial rules that have resulted in numerous conservative accounts being taken down.

In response, a top aide for the House Energy and Commerce committee, which oversees and regulates telecommunications companies and social media publishers like Twitter, told The Federalist that the committee is looking into whether Dorsey lied. Hours later, incoming Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called for a congressional investigation into Twitter’s practices. Only after the increased attention from Congress did Twitter reinstate Kelly’s account — and without any explanation.

[Angrboda]

Facebook Wielded Data to Reward, Punish Rivals, Emails Show

Facebook Inc. wielded user data like a bargaining chip, providing access when that sharing might encourage people to spend more time on the social network -- and imposing strict limits on partners in cases where it saw a potential competitive threat, emails show.

A trove of internal correspondence, published online Wednesday by U.K. lawmakers, provides a look into the ways Facebook bosses, including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, treated information posted by users like a commodity that could be harnessed in service of business goals. Apps were invited to use Facebook’s network to grow, as long as that increased usage of Facebook. Certain competitors, in a list reviewed by Zuckerberg himself, were not allowed to use Facebook’s tools and data without his personal sign-off.

In early 2013, Twitter Inc. launched the Vine video-sharing service, which drew on a Facebook tool that let Vine users connect to their Facebook friends. Alerted to the possible competitive threat by an engineer who recommended cutting off Vine’s access to Facebook data, Zuckerberg replied succinctly: “Yup, go for it.”

[The Grand Nudger]

Tucker Carlsons White Power Hour is shedding advertisers.

At least 16 advertisers have now dropped “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after the Fox News host said in a show last Thursday that immigrants to the United States made the country “poorer” and “dirtier.”

As of Tuesday morning, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, TD Ameritrade, Just For Men, United Explorer credit card, ScotteVest, Voya Financial, Zenni Optical, Pacific Life, Indeed, Bowflex, SmileDirectClub, NerdWallet, Minted, Ancestry.com, and IHOP Jaguar had all told TheWrap they plan to suspend advertising on the program.

https://www.thewrap.com/tucker-carlson-d...rant-flap/