On Monday, billionaire leftist George Soros, seemingly panicked that President Trump might be reelected, attacked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, demanding that they be removed from their posts because Zuckerberg will not capitulate to leftists&#8217; calls for censoring or banning political ads.
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/88f6875a-519d-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f">Writing in Financial Times</a>, Soros accused Zuckerberg of having a “mutual assistance arrangement” with Trump that will “help him get re-elected.” His open letter, in which he referred to an article in Financial Times on Sunday penned by Zuckerberg, stated:
<blockquote>Mark Zuckerberg should stop obfuscating the facts by piously arguing for government regulation (“We need more regulation of Big Tech”, February 17). Mr. Zuckerberg appears to be engaged in some kind of mutual assistance arrangement with Donald Trump that will help him to get re-elected.
Facebook does not need to wait for government regulations to stop accepting any political advertising in 2020 until after the elections on November 4. If there is any doubt whether an ad is political, it should err on the side of caution and refuse to publish. It is unlikely that Facebook will follow this course. Therefore, I repeat my proposal, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should be removed from control of Facebook. (It goes without saying that I support government regulation of social media platforms.)</blockquote>
Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5">had written</a> that he wanted to wait for regulation because he wanted a fair set of rules for everyone across the board, opining:
<blockquote>We believe advertising is more transparent on Facebook than television, print or other online services. We publish details about political and issue ads — including who paid for them, how much was spent, and how many people were reached — in our ads library. But who decides what counts as political advertising in a democracy? If a non-profit runs an ad about immigration during an election, is it political? Who should decide — private companies, or governments?
Another theme is openness. I’m glad the EU is looking at making data sharing easier, because it enables people to build things that are valuable for society. International agencies use Facebook’s Data for Good program to figure out which communities need help after natural disasters, and governments use our publicly available population density maps for vaccination campaigns. Of course, you should always be able to transfer your data between services.
But how do we define what counts as your data? If I share something with you, like my birthday, should you be able to take that data to other services, like your calendar app? Is that my data or yours? We have to balance promoting innovation and research against protecting people’s privacy and security. Without clear rules on portability, strict privacy laws encourage companies to lock down data, refusing to share with others, to minimize regulatory risks …
I believe good regulation may hurt Facebook’s business in the near term but it will be better for everyone, including us, over the long term. These are problems that need to be fixed and that affect our industry as a whole. If we don’t create standards that people feel are legitimate, they won’t trust institutions or technology. Of course, we won’t agree with every proposal. Regulation can have unintended consequences, especially for small businesses that can’t do sophisticated data analysis and marketing on their own. Millions of small businesses rely on companies like ours to do this for them. If regulation makes it harder for them to share data and use these tools, that could disproportionately hurt them and inadvertently advantage larger companies that can.
Still, rather than relying on individual companies to set their own standards, we’d benefit from a more democratic process. This is why we’re pushing for new legislation, and it’s why we support existing US proposals to prevent election interference like the Honest Ads Act and the Deter Act.</blockquote>
He concluded, “I believe clearer rules would be better for everyone. The internet is a powerful force for social and economic empowerment. Regulation that protects people and supports innovation can ensure it stays that way.”

Day Three Of World Economic Forum 2019

Leftist Billionaire Soros Wants Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Removed. Accuses Him Of ‘Mutual Assistance Arrangement With Donald Trump’

Donald Trump

Facebook

George Soros

Mark Zuckerberg

A video intercutting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s (D-CA) infamous shredding of the State of the Union Address with the Americans President Trump honored in the speech has gone viral, racking up tens of millions of views. In response, Pelosi&#8217;s camp is attempting to pressure social media platforms to remove it. The group that posted the video, Turning Point USA, is refusing to budge, and, so far, so are the platforms.
The video was produced and posted by Freedom Fights, a Facebook and Instagram channel run by Turning Point USA. It was soon picked up by President Trump&#8217;s son, Donald Trump Jr., who posted it on his popular Twitter account, and then President Trump himself, who tweeted it out on Thursday:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<a href="https://t.co/QhTWvcY4Ke">pic.twitter.com/QhTWvcY4Ke</a>
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1225553117929988097?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 6, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The video has amassed over 11 million views on Twitter alone, with another 10+ million on other platforms.
After Trump tweeted out the video, Speaker Pelosi&#8217;s office began pressuring platforms to remove the damaging video.
&#8220;The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders&#8217; interests than the public&#8217;s interests,&#8221; tweeted Speaker Pelosi’s Deputy Chief of Staff Drew Hammill.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests.
&mdash; Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) <a href="https://twitter.com/Drew_Hammill/status/1225830201948590081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Several Democrats, including Rhode Island&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-congressman-asks-twitter-to-remove-trump-video-of-pelosi-ripping-up-sotu-speech">David Cicilline</a>, have since joined Pelosi in trying to force social media platforms to cave to their censorship demands (see below).
&#8220;This is cancel culture coming to Congress,&#8221; said Turning Point Founder and President Charlie Kirk in response to Pelosi&#8217;s pressure campaign. &#8220;Our Turning Point USA production team had the brilliant idea to make a visually moving clip of what Speaker Pelosi was ripping up when she tore up the president’s speech. There was absolutely nothing deceptive about the video. We’ve been surprised, and frankly horrified, by the many Democrats calling for censorship including from the speaker’s own office. Thankfully, many patriots have come out and reposted the video including the president. Needless to say, we will not be pulling the video and the Speaker’s misguided attempts at silencing us have had the exact opposite effect.&#8221;
Several media outlets have aided Pelosi&#8217;s cause, describing the video as &#8220;doctored&#8221; and suggesting that it has been &#8220;edited&#8221; in a deceptive way. The Associated Press reported on Pelosi&#8217;s attempts to pressure Twitter and Facebook over the viral &#8220;speech ripping&#8221; video on Monday, which AP framed as an issue of spreading &#8220;<a href="https://apnews.com/12443c46b8cfee5e9659abb31eee5142">misleading political messages</a>.&#8221;
&#8220;Pelosi’s office asked Twitter and Facebook to take down the video. Both services refused, saying it does not violate their policies intended to prohibit intentionally deceptive videos,&#8221; AP reported. &#8220;Researchers worry the video’s &#8216;selective editing&#8217; could mislead people if social media companies don’t step in and properly label or regulate similar videos.&#8221;
In a press release Monday, TPUSA laid out the following timeline of the thus far unsuccessful pressure campaign to pull the video:
<blockquote>The video was originally posted on the Freedom Fights Facebook and Instagram pages on Wednesday, Feb. 5.
It was then reposted by Donald Trump Jr.
Then the president reposted it on Instagram. The next day, he tweeted it.
Soon after the president posted the video to Twitter, Speaker Pelosi’s team began demanding the video be removed from social media.
Speaker Pelosi’s Deputy Chief of Staff Drew Hammill, stated on Twitter: &#8220;The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders&#8217; interests than the public&#8217;s interests.&#8221;
Andy Stone with Facebook’s communication’s team replied: &#8220;Sorry, are you suggesting the President didn&#8217;t make those remarks and the Speaker didn&#8217;t rip the speech?&#8221;
Pelosi Deputy Chief of Staff replied back: &#8220;What planet are you living on? this is deceptively altered. take it down.&#8221;
Other Democrats joined in: Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas): &#8220;This video is clearly another deceptive effort by @realDonaldTrump to mislead and manipulate the American people, Hey @jack , show your commitment to cut down on the misinformation corroding our nation and take down this fake video.&#8221;
Rep. Ro Khanna, (D- California) &#8220;@Twitter must take this misleading video about @SpeakerPelosi down now. Social media platforms are a place where people come for news &amp; information. They need to have certain standards. Falsity has never been part of our 1st Amendment tradition.&#8221;
Rep. Don Beyer (D- Virginia) &#8220;This video is doctored. It has been up, and pinned to the President&#8217;s page, for nearly a day. Trump posted it to deceive Americans about @SpeakerPelosi&#8217;s actions and record. If I posted a doctored video it would be a clear violation House Rules. @Twitter should take this down.&#8221;
Rep. David Cicilline (D- Rhode Island) &#8220;Hey @Twitter, this video is clearly edited in a way that’s intended to mislead viewers. You should take it down. &#8221;
TPUSA Chief Creative Officer Benny Johnson responded in a thread and in an op-ed saying in part: “Pelosi and her foot soldiers in Congress feign outrage and call President Trump an authoritarian, when in reality it is they who cannot resist the tyrannical impulse to control, censor and silence. But this is the digital age. Instead of burning books, they&#8217;re banning videos. 
Thankfully, we live in America where we have a right and a duty to hold the powerful accountable. We must protect that.” 
Since the controversy, the views of the “speech-ripping” video have accelerated. The video has 10 million views on Twitter alone with notable conservative leaders coming out publicly in support including Rep. Mark Meadows, White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino, and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.
&nbsp;</blockquote>

Nancy Pelosi Shreds SOTU

Pelosi Demands Twitter, Facebook Pull Viral ‘Speech Ripping’ Video; Group Behind It Responds

Censorship

Nancy Pelosi

Turning Point USA

Twitter

Author Stephen King has decided to quit Facebook, objecting to the social media giant&#8217;s refusal to fact-check political advertisements.
King, 72, was a big user of Facebook, but deactivated his account on Friday.
In a weird, 21st century twist, King took to another social media platform, Twitter, to announce his departure.
&#8220;I&#8217;m quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that&#8217;s allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users&#8217; privacy. Follow me (and Molly, aka The Thing of Evil) on Twitter, if you like,&#8221; King wrote to his 5.6 million followers.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I&#39;m quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that&#39;s allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users&#39; privacy. Follow me (and Molly, aka The Thing of Evil) on Twitter, if you like.
&mdash; Stephen King (@StephenKing) <a href="https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1223425267831574534?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 1, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
King, the author of &#8220;The Shining&#8221; and numerous other horror novels, was reacting to Facebook&#8217;s refusal to ban paid political ads. Facebook has also refused to fact-check political ads, which has also prompted others to leave the site.
Explaining its decision, Facebook wrote that &#8220;in the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies. We have based ours on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.&#8221;
On the same day that King announced he was quitting Facebook, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke at at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Utah, vowing to support free speech. &#8220;Increasingly we&#8217;re getting called to censor a lot of different kinds of content that makes me really uncomfortable,&#8221; Zuckerberg said.
King follows another Hollywood icon, actor Mark Hamill, in leaving the social media giant. In January, he announced that he was quitting Facebook, also criticizing the company’s policy on political ads.
“So disappointed that #MarkZuckerberg values profit more than truthfulness that I’ve decided to delete my @Facebook account. I know this is a big ‘Who Cares?’ for the world at large, but I’ll sleep better at night,” he wrote — on Twitter. He hashtagged the post “#PatriotismOverProfits.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
So disappointed that <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MarkZuckerberg?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MarkZuckerberg</a> values profit more than truthfulness that I&#39;ve decided to delete my <a href="https://twitter.com/Facebook?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Facebook</a> account. I know this is a big &quot;Who Cares?&quot; for the world at large, but I&#39;ll sleep better at night. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PatriotismOverProfits?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#PatriotismOverProfits</a> 🇲🇾&gt;💰 <a href="https://t.co/seb2eJMTo6">https://t.co/seb2eJMTo6</a>
&mdash; Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) <a href="https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1216482695061966848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In his tweet, Hamill linked a New York Times story about Facebook’s decision. Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, defended Facebook&#8217;s decision to accept all political ads, telling The Times, “Ultimately, we don’t think decisions about political ads should be made by private companies.”
“In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies. We have based ours on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public,” Leathern said.
Other high-profile figures who have deleted their accounts include the singer Cher, comedian Will Ferrell, actor Jim Carrey and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
“Borat” actor Sacha Baron Cohen criticized Facebook in a November speech as he accepted an award from the Anti-Defamation League, saying that if Facebook had existed during Adolf Hitler’s reign atop the Third Reich, he could have posted “30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
Facebook fired back, saying Cohen “misrepresented Facebook’s policies” because Facebook bans hate speech.
While Hamill may have quit Facebook, he remains active on Twitter and Instagram (which, by the way, is owned by Facebook). Twitter, though, has banned all political advertisements from its platform, with the company’s chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeting that he believed “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

Obama Presents National Medal Of Arts And National Humanities Medal At White House

Stephen King Quits Facebook In A Huff For ‘Flood Of False Information’

Stephen King

With Mark Zuckerberg deciding to allow more leeway for free speech on his social media platform, some leftists are now trashing Facebook as a would-be enforcement arm of all things evil.
Writing for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/opinion/soros-facebook-zuckerberg.html">The New York Times</a>, billionaire and far-left activist George Soros attacked Zuckerberg for allowing President Donald Trump to be elected in 2016 and enabling his coming re-election in 2020.
Recalling a dinner he attended in Davos, Switzerland, Soros remembered being asked if Facebook was behaving more responsibly four years after Trump&#8217;s re-election.
“Facebook helped Trump to get elected and I am afraid that it will do the same in 2020,&#8221; Soros claimed to have said during the dinner.
Soros cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes most large social media platforms from liability for defamation.
&#8220;Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them,&#8221; wrote Soros.
Soros even accused Facebook of developing “an informal mutual assistance operation or agreement&#8221; with President Trump in exchange for protection against attacks from regulators and the media. A <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/george-soros-facebook-trump-election-conspiracy-2020-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Facebook spokesman told Business Insider </a>that this charge is &#8220;just plain wrong.&#8221;
&#8220;I believe that Mr. Trump and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, realize that their interests are aligned — the president’s in winning elections, Mr. Zuckerberg’s in making money,&#8221; asserted Soros. &#8220;Let’s look at the evidence: In 2016, Facebook provided the Trump campaign with embedded staff who helped to optimize its advertising program. (Hillary Clinton’s campaign was also approached, but it declined to embed a Facebook team in her campaign’s operations.) Brad Parscale, the digital director of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and now his campaign manager for 2020, said that Facebook helped Mr. Trump and gave him the edge. This seems to have marked the beginning of a special relationship.&#8221;
Soros then cited Zuckerberg&#8217;s meeting with the president in the Oval Office in the fall of 2019 and Trump later saying in regards to the meeting, &#8220;I’d rather have him just do whatever he is going to do. He’s done a hell of a job, when you think of it.”
Following the 2016 election, Facebook and other social media platforms pledged to combat fake news by employing a team of &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; that would flag content they deemed misleading. Here&#8217;s the company&#8217;s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/1952307158131536">current policy</a> described in its own words:
<blockquote>We&#8217;re committed to <a href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsroom.fb.com%2Fnews%2F2018%2F05%2Fhard-questions-false-news%2F&amp;h=AT3pnRaPocRuztR-Pwbmg5Hw3AMWx6obYQ89XfoMcmQFuAbuf2-92feW3XhYlDzST6GidB71MFhKG-gmAJBrVqGWs5CW_iUcGhgfejtfF1UMysDOgXJhqlA1S2FQqdgn24_JBsU" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow noreferrer" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy">fighting the spread of false news</a> on Facebook. We use both technology and human review to remove fake accounts, promote news literacy and disrupt the financial incentives of spammers. In <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/182222309230722">certain countries</a>, we also work with <a href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsroom.fb.com%2Fnews%2F2018%2F06%2Fhard-questions-fact-checking%2F&amp;h=AT24zy8e3JgnAoLbNO0ITR7i0IEusA6Me9pMHTk3w8YIhlj0cDFY693tk_fKVs53-DqXLk96tmZe9rdZc1h3D15vKQZMkRjdRUk4ViKHy2b1oisGN8QxPtZcvpJ3FYRYBwaRmXQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow noreferrer" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy">third-party fact-checkers</a> who are <a href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org%2F&amp;h=AT3QlqMp4kdBKV83V_wtClVPIRcQbjD4D8MpbbD-_je_070k8EKOROu7a6nFfyk-qJLflCFdRM_1lf1Ve6iKSs8sn3bMR0BY4J_olN4zV0KDFZudDXs_blgZ7HXybsUan9tJfps" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow noreferrer" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy">certified</a> through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network to help identify and review false news.</blockquote>
According to Soros, however, Facebook has &#8220;flung open the door for false, manipulated, extreme and incendiary statements&#8221; while rewarding such content with &#8220;prime placement and promotion if it meets Facebook-designed algorithmic standards for popularity and engagement.&#8221;
&#8220;I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg,&#8221; he concluded. &#8220;They follow only one guiding principle: Maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.&#8221;
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has simultaneously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/facebook-co-founder-its-dangerous-break-it-paul-bois">argued</a> that Facebook has given far too much leeway to political speech, fearing that Mark Zuckerberg has grown hungry with power.
“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of these companies may be,” Hughes wrote in 2019. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American. It is time to break up Facebook.”

George Soros Attacks Facebook: ‘Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be In Control’

The Force may be with him, but not the Face.
Star Wars star Mark Hamill has announced that he is quitting Facebook. He criticized the company&#8217;s policy on political ads and said he was &#8220;disappointed&#8221; with Facebook&#8217;s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
&#8220;So disappointed that #MarkZuckerberg values profit more than truthfulness that I&#8217;ve decided to delete my @Facebook account. I know this is a big &#8216;Who Cares?&#8217; for the world at large, but I&#8217;ll sleep better at night,&#8221; he wrote — on Twitter. He hashtagged the post &#8220;#PatriotismOverProfits.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
So disappointed that <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MarkZuckerberg?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MarkZuckerberg</a> values profit more than truthfulness that I&#39;ve decided to delete my <a href="https://twitter.com/Facebook?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Facebook</a> account. I know this is a big &quot;Who Cares?&quot; for the world at large, but I&#39;ll sleep better at night. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PatriotismOverProfits?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#PatriotismOverProfits</a> 🇲🇾&gt;💰 <a href="https://t.co/seb2eJMTo6">https://t.co/seb2eJMTo6</a>
&mdash; Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) <a href="https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1216482695061966848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
For some reason, Hamill included a Malaysian flag. He later corrected that with this post:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
🇺🇸&gt;💰
&mdash; Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) <a href="https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1216552601841364992?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 13, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Hamill&#8217;s original tweet has drawn more than 6,000 replies and has been retweeted 21,000 times. More than 175,000 have liked the post.
Hamill&#8217;s move follows an announcement from Facebook last week that it would allow politicians to run advertisements on the social media platform without policing the veracity of their content. In his tweet, Hamill linked a New York Times story about Facebook&#8217;s decision.
Rob Leathern, Facebook&#8217;s director of product management, defended the move, saying, &#8220;Ultimately, we don’t think decisions about political ads should be made by private companies.&#8221;
&#8220;In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies. We have based ours on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public,&#8221; Leathern said.
Other high-profile figures who have deleted their accounts include the singer Cher, comedian Will Ferrell, actor Jim Carrey and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
“Borat” actor Sacha Baron Cohen criticized Facebook in a November speech as he accepted an award from the Anti-Defamation League, saying that if Facebook had existed during Adolf Hitler’s reign atop the Third Reich, he could have posted “30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
Facebook fired back, saying Cohen “misrepresented Facebook’s policies” because Facebook bans hate speech.
Hamill deeply loathes President Trump. He even takes his animosity toward Trump out on his grandchildren.
In September, first daughter Ivanka Trump posted a photo of her family wherein her youngest son, three-year-old Theodore, was dressed as a Stormtrooper. She captioned the post, “The Force is strong in my family.”
Hamill responded: “You misspelled ‘Fraud,’” adding the hashtag #GoForceYourself.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
You misspelled &quot;Fraud.&quot;<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GoForceYourself?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GoForceYourself</a> <a href="https://t.co/ORY6eeyGgj">https://t.co/ORY6eeyGgj</a>
&mdash; Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) <a href="https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1178394628464070656?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 29, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Weeks after Trump was elected, Hamill lashed out.
“I’m in total denial,” Hamill told The Daily Beast. The actor who played Luke Skywalker, who now hosts a show called &#8220;Pop Culture Quest,&#8221; said: “I’m glad I have [the show] to take my mind off what’s going on. Because if you look at what’s being assembled for our government it’s like, yikes. It’s a who’s-who of really despicable people.”
While he may have quit Facebook, Hamill remains active on Twitter and Instagram (which, by the way, is owned by Facebook). Twitter, though, has banned all political advertisements from its platform, with the company&#8217;s chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeting that he believed &#8220;political message reach should be earned, not bought.&#8221;

Mark Hamill is Honored with Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

‘Star Wars’ Icon, Trump Critic Mark Hamill Quits Facebook Over Political Ads

Mark Hamill

Star Wars

As artificial intelligence advances, the capacity for malicious actors to covertly spread misinformation has also increased. To mitigate this, Facebook has announced that the company will no longer allow “deepfake videos” or “misleading manipulated media” on its platform.
But in order for content to be banned, it must meet a strict criteria. First, it must have “been edited or synthesized — beyond adjustments for clarity or quality — in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words they did not actually say,” writes Monica Bickert, the vice president for global policy engagement at Facebook, in a <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/01/enforcing-against-manipulated-media/">blog post</a> published on Monday. 
In addition, the content must be “the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic.” The blog post also notes that the policy “does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.”
According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-says-it-will-ban-deepfakes.html">The New York Times</a>, &#8220;deepfakes&#8221; that meet both of the above criteria will also be banned from political ads. 
After Facebook announced the new policy, left-wing outlets were quick to imply that the policy was not comprehensive enough. While <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/7/21055024/facebook-ban-deepfake-video">Vox</a> lamented that “controversial fake videos like the one of Nancy Pelosi that made her appear to be drunk” would not be banned, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/06/facebook-ban-deepfakes-sources-say-new-policy-may-not-cover-controversial-pelosi-video/">The Washington Post</a>, which has called the Pelosi video “doctored,” noted in a headline about the policy change that the “new policy may not cover the controversial Pelosi video.” 
Earlier this week, the U.S. House Committee on Energy &amp; Commerce issued a <a href="https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF17/20200108/110351/HHRG-116-IF17-20200108-SD002.pdf">memo</a> that described “deepfakes” as “videos that have been manipulated using machine learning technology such as a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN, to look and sound real. These videos can show people doing and saying things they never did or said. The GAN process detects flaws in the fake video, which is then used to improve the fake video.”
The Nancy Pelosi video does not seem to meet this threshold. 
Facebook has also been subject to criticism for refusing to remove factually incorrect (in the eyes of at least some &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221;) content from its platform, but the tech giant has repeatedly defended its decision that the company should not attempt to serve the role of arbiter of truth. 
“If we simply removed all manipulated videos flagged by fact-checkers as false, the videos would still be available elsewhere on the internet or social media ecosystem,” writes Bickert in the blog post. “By leaving them up and labelling them as false, we’re providing people with important information and context.”
“Our enforcement strategy against misleading manipulated media also benefits from our efforts to root out the people behind these efforts,” continues Bickert. “Just last month, we identified and removed a network using AI-generated photos to conceal their fake accounts. Our teams continue to proactively hunt for fake accounts and other coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The Facebook announcement comes on the heels of a House subcommittee meeting being held today about deception in the digital age and the risks associated with &#8220;deepfake&#8221; technologies. Bickert is expected to testify.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Before The House Financial Services Committee

Facebook Bans ‘Deepfakes’ From Platform, Left-Wing Outlets Concerned Nancy Pelosi Video Doesn’t Count

On Wednesday, right-leaning political personality and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html">&#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221;</a> icon Dave Rubin announced the launch of a previously teased venture whose goal is to combat the status quo of rampant Big Tech censorship, de-platforming, and de-monetization practices: <a href="https://locals.com">Locals.com</a>.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
If you’re a creator and you want to own your own community, set your own rules, post video and audio to a curated feed, chat with supporters, sell tickets to events, build your own network with other creators and much more, join us on <a href="https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0">https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0</a>
The future is now. <a href="https://t.co/JfSRcGbMDq">pic.twitter.com/JfSRcGbMDq</a>
&mdash; Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1202288504006307841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
With the tag line of &#8220;Own your community, Own your future,&#8221; Locals pitches itself to content creators as a one-stop &#8220;home for all your content&#8221; through which creators can &#8220;[p]ost videos, photos, podcasts, messages, and polls,&#8221; as well as &#8220;[s]ell tickets to events, and offer exclusive content to your supporters.&#8221; The site advertises that it can strengthen content creators&#8217; relationship with their fans by removing the Big Tech middlemen and serve as a networking/community hub by allowing content creators to easily and freely associate with others. Perhaps most importantly, Locals tells creators to &#8220;[s]et your own rules&#8221; for interaction, in marked distinction with the &#8220;inconsistent and unfair moderation&#8221; of Big Tech.
Rubin, who is currently the only person publicly identified with launching the Locals project, spoke exclusively with The Daily Wire for a wide-ranging interview about the origins and importance of Locals.
&#8220;Everyone knows there is a massive problem with Big Tech,&#8221; Rubin began. &#8220;We have all outsourced all of our ability to communicate with each other to these Big Tech behemoths — no one really owns their content or knows what their terms of service are.&#8221;
Creators have very little access to their own audiences, Rubin continued, because Big Tech companies are clearly manipulating their algorithms and engaging in clandestine shadow-banning-type behavior. With the status quo, content creators have no way of ensuring that they can actually reach all of their followers and subscribers.
&#8220;For someone like me, from a libertarian/classical liberal way of thinking,&#8221; Rubin went on, &#8220;it’s time to reverse this. It’s time for creators, who are the real drivers of social media — the people who are generating clicks and creating podcasts — to be in control. It&#8217;s time for a new model.&#8221;
Locals, Rubin explained, &#8220;is a community-based app and desktop website where you can post audio, post video, communicate with your fans, and so forth. It’s subscription-only, so that takes care of all the bots and trolls and anonymous haters. One of the reasons that everyone hates everything online is that you have smart people arguing with these pink fox anime avatars on Twitter.&#8221;
Rubin&#8217;s signature &#8220;Rubin Report&#8221; program is the very first Local, he said, and he promised that more big-name creators will be rolled out soon. It will be up to each content creator to decide how much to charge for access to his/her Local, beginning with as little as three dollars per month. Each Local not only sets his/her own rules, but also owns his/her users&#8217; data — &#8220;so that, even if you leave Locals,&#8221; Rubin noted, &#8220;you can still communicate directly&#8221; with your fans.
Suffice it to say this is a very different model than the one currently deployed by Big Tech giants like YouTube.
&#8220;There are so many people out there around the world who have all this great stuff to say, but these platforms are controlled by external platforms who manipulate,&#8221; Rubin said, coming to a crescendo. &#8220;I want to give every creator the chance to be truly independent. I created a tech company, not a platform.&#8221;
Combatting Big Tech censorship is an increasingly popular political agenda for the American Right. Freshman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has made taking on Big Tech a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">focal point of his first year</a> in office. Earlier this week, furthermore, numerous leading conservative thinkers co-signed an <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/for-real-american-greatness-a-tech-new-deal/">essay</a> for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal that called for a &#8220;Tech New Deal&#8221; intended to ultimately &#8220;ensure[] America can extend its greatness well into the digital age.&#8221;

Dave Rubin

Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

Free Speech

Intellectual Dark Web

Josh Hawley

Technology

YouTube

Alumni of the Clinton campaign and left-leaning critics of Facebook claim that revelations from a recent Wall Street Journal story about how both the Trump and Clinton operations handled social media demonstrate how Facebook “favored” Trump in the 2016 elections.
But, it seems, the lack of attention Clinton got on social media was Clinton’s fault, not Facebook’s.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a key figure in President Donald Trump’s 2016 social media strategy has now “jumped ship” and is helping organizations looking to remove the President from power.
Buried deep in the story, critics claim, is evidence that Facebook provided Trump’s operations with consultants, helped them understand the platform’s ads system, and use the system to maximize their ads’ visibility. As a result, “every dollar that the Trump campaign spent on [Facebook] ads yielded $2 to $3 in fundraising dollars.”
The Daily Beast’s editor, Noah Shachtman even claimed that the “stunning story” “shows how Facebook worked overtime for Trump – crafting digital strategy, creating custom code, and experimenting with different ways to maximize pro-Donald content.”
Ultimately, Trump ended up spending around $44 million targeting users on Facebook with fundraising ads.
Even Hillary Clinton herself has used that number as evidence that social media is a menace to the political process, alleging that platforms like Facebook can be bought.
“We should all care about how social-media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again,” Clinton tweeted in 2018. “The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast.”
But what the critics &#8212; and Clinton &#8212; fail to grasp, it seems, is that Facebook’s utilities and consultations are neutral and available to anyone who needs them. Only Trump’s team took advantage of them, giving them better insight into how Facebook works, and helping them maximize their return on investment.
The evidence was there back in 2018, when Clinton began to fret about the situation publicly.
“[B]ecause Trump used provocative content to stoke social-media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money,” one expert told Vanity Fair at the time. “Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.”
That was because Trump was taking advantage of Facebook’s services. Clinton’s team, it seems, thought they could get the same results alone.
“The companies offered such services, without charge, to all the 2016 candidates,” the WSJ reported. &#8220;But Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined to embed the companies employees in her operations, instead opting to develop its own digital apparatus.”
The story says that Clinton called in tech experts to help, but too little too late, and the experts she called in didn’t have the same level of knowledge Facebook’s own insiders did.
Ultimately, its not clear that either operation was able to use Facebook to get results at the ballot box. While the Trump campaign did raise money, digital targeting may not have been effective at turning out votes.
But that doesn’t mean Clinton, still looking for an excuse to explain her 2016 loss – that has nothing to do with her own miserable operation – is more than happy to consider the possibility.

Michelle Obama Campaigns With Hillary Clinton In North Carolina

The Clinton Campaign Is Accusing Facebook Of Favoring Trump. That’s Not What Happened.

Hillary Clinton

Rocker Neil Young has had it with Facebook.
The singer and guitarist has deleted his artist page off the social media site, saying he&#8217;s had enough of the “false information regularly supplied to the public” on the platform.
Young, who has repeatedly ripped President Trump, cited Facebook&#8217;s decision to sponsor the Federalist Society’s annual gala, which he describes as the “powerful right-wing organization behind the nomination of the conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.”
“This turn of events, in addition to the false information regularly supplied to the public on Facebook, with its knowledge, has caused us to re-evaluate and change our policy,” Young wrote on his website, <a href="https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article?id=Facebook-Is-Toast-At-NYA">Neil Young Archives</a> (NYA). “I don’t feel that a social site should be making obvious commitments to one side of politics or the other. It further confuses readers regarding truthfulness in coverage and message. NYA, no longer interested in further links with FACEBOOK, will be discontinuing use. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”
Young, a Canadian, is seeking to gain U.S. citizenship so he can vote in the upcoming presidential election. He claims his application for citizenship is being delayed due to his use of marijuana.
This is just the latest time that a celebrity has publicly quit Facebook. In 2018, the #DeleteFacebook hashtag trended, and users ripped the platform for repeated controversies and scandals.
The singer Cher said she would not use Google and would delete her Facebook account, saying those companies &#8220;might as well be conspiring with Russia to destroy our Democracy.&#8221;
Comedian Will Ferrell also deleted his Facebook page, delivering a lengthy message on his decision:
<blockquote>Hi Friends,
I&#8217;m reaching out to let you know that in 72 hours I will be deleting my Facebook account. I am not deleting it immediately, in order to give this message enough time to get across to my fans and followers.
I have always had an aversion to social media and have primarily used it as a tool to help support our work at Funny Or Die, some of my personal projects, as well as charity causes that I am passionate about. Facebook allowed me to promote and share the work of many dedicated and talented individuals who deserved recognition.
I know I am not alone when I say that I was very disturbed to hear about Cambridge Analytica&#8217;s misuse of millions of Facebook users&#8217; information in order to undermine our democracy and infringe on our citizens&#8217; privacy. I was further appalled to learn that Facebook&#8217;s reaction to such a violation was to suspend the account of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.
In this day and age, with misinformation running rampant, it&#8217;s important that we protect the truth, as well as those who work to bring it to light. I can no longer, in good conscience, use the services of a company that allowed the spread of propaganda and directly aimed it at those most vulnerable.
I love my fans and hope to further interact with them through my comedy via the mediums of film and television.
-Will Ferrell</blockquote>

Neil Young

Neil Young Quits Facebook For Promoting ‘False Information To The Public’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been on a crusade to force social media platforms like Facebook to crack down on political ads, claiming that lenient ad policies, like the one Facebook employs, allow political campaigns to lie about key issues, creating confusion.
But her concerns seem to end at social media political ads she disagrees with. When Twitter announced a crackdown on political ads &#8212; like the one Warren is pushing for Facebook &#8212; Warren lashed out at the social media platform for censoring important content because Twitter&#8217;s definition of &#8220;politics&#8221; includes contentious issues like &#8220;climate change.&#8221;
&#8220;Twitter&#8217;s new ad policy will allow fossil fuel companies to buy ads defending themselves and spreading misleading info—but won&#8217;t allow organizations fighting the climate crisis to buy ads holding those companies accountable. We need accountability,&#8221; the Democratic presidential contender wailed in a tweet.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Twitter&#39;s new ad policy will allow fossil fuel companies to buy ads defending themselves and spreading misleading info—but won&#39;t allow organizations fighting the climate crisis to buy ads holding those companies accountable. We need accountability. <a href="https://t.co/B9RtX7hC5g">https://t.co/B9RtX7hC5g</a>
&mdash; Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) <a href="https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1191814840731480064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 5, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Just last month, Warren, of course, made the opposite argument against Facebook, buying an intentionally misleading political ad on the social network to demonstrate that Facebook does not adquately police purchased content.
The ad started with a claim that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump and ended with the Massachusetts Democrat revealing that her ad had been deliberately fabricated to demonstrate what could get by Facebook&#8217;s ad censors.
&#8220;You&#8217;re probably shocked,&#8221; the ad read. &#8220;And you might be thinking, &#8216;how could this possibly be true?&#8217; Well, it&#8217;s not.&#8221;
We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook&#8217;s ad platform to see if it&#8217;d be approved,&#8221; Warren later tweeted. &#8220;It got approved quickly.&#8221;
She then accused Facebook of prioritizing profits over quality and honesty, eventually even moaning that the social network was &#8220;taking money to promote lies.&#8221;
Facebook responded that, &#8220;FCC doesn&#8217;t want broadcast companies censoring candidates&#8217; speech&#8221; and &#8220;[w]e agree it&#8217;s better to let voters &#8212; not companies &#8212; decide.&#8221;
Twitter seems to be taking the opposite view, announcing last week that it would be policing all political content &#8212; including issue-based content &#8212; on its platform in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation.
&#8220;We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,&#8221; Twitter&#8217;s CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted last Wednesday. &#8220;A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.&#8221;
&#8220;Political advertising,&#8221; Jack went on, includes &#8220;issue ads.&#8221;
&#8220;We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we&#8217;re stopping these too.&#8221;
That includes, per Twitter&#8217;s policies:
<blockquote>1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or
2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)</blockquote>
Essentially, Dorsey&#8217;s rationale is the same as Warren&#8217;s: social networks should take responsibility for misinformation being spread on their network by actively policing content. The only way to do that is either to allow all political and issue content or to ban all political or issue content. Facebook chose the former and earned Warren&#8217;s ire. Twitter chose the latter and, well, also earned Warren&#8217;s ire.
The only difference with Twitter&#8217;s policy is, of course, that it actively prevents Warren&#8217;s allies from purchasing ads promoting their particular political ideas &#8212; and she certainly doesn&#8217;t like that.
Unfortunately for speech purists, it seems Warren&#8217;s concerns struck a chord with the leftist mob on Twitter and Dorsey was backed into a corner. Responding to Warren, he said that the rules were not yet official and that he and his team were taking their concerns under advisement: “We haven’t announced our new rules yet. They come out 11/15. Taking all this into consideration.&#8221;

Elizabeth Warren

Irony: Elizabeth Warren Slams Twitter’s Political Ad Ban Because It Covers Climate Change

Last week, Katherine Miller at BuzzFeed published an essay on how the 2010s &#8220;broke our sense of time.&#8221; On the same day, Georgetown University released a survey showing the average voter thinks we are &#8220;two-thirds of the way to the edge of a civil war.&#8221;
I have no idea what the &#8220;edge&#8221; of a civil war is, but I do think we are at a moment of serious discontent in the country, and I think it is directly related to the point of Miller&#8217;s essay about algorithms reordering our lives. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the internet now show us content in a timeline designed to increase our interaction and our clicks. Their algorithms have taken us out of chronology.
With the algorithm, what is old can be new again. Things that happened a week ago appear repeatedly in our timelines as if they are fresh and new. People now visit places that they see repeatedly on Instagram because others are going there. People get mad at news because news is designed to get them mad. Hate clicks generate revenue for news sites. Outrage holds your attention.
The algorithm feeds the fire. Teen suicide rates have climbed since the introduction of the iPhone — the moment our national addiction to screens began. People used the blame the 24-hour news cycle. Now we have the algorithmic news cycle, where news from two years ago can show up like it is new to drive anxiety and outrage. Kids on Instagram and Snapchat can now, over and over again, relive the images of their friends at the parties they didn&#8217;t even know were happening, driving their depression. Their parents can see the selectively edited footage of a news event designed to drive their outrage and then continue seeing it over and over as others share it. None of it slips by unseen.
Social media companies share some of the blame for taking us out of chronology and putting us into algorithms designed not to show us new, interesting stuff but to keep us using sites and services — to keep us clicking.
Add to all of this the decreasing tolerance for Grace, and the situation is spiraling chaotically toward violence. Each of us is now defined by the worst thing we have done, which is helpfully recirculated by others on social media. There is no need to improve or grow up because we will never be credited with doing so when one person with a social media audience can tie us back to the worst thing we have done. College athletes are now routinely destroyed for things they did as teenagers. Guys raising money for charity are blackballed by decade-old tweets from when they were going through puberty. The algorithm amplifies the damage.
There is, of course, a cure for this, but it is one no one has incentive to provide when everyone and everything is now anchored in the digital. Get offline and into your community. Scripture says to seek the welfare of the city in which you are in exile, and there you will find your welfare. But too few are doing that because the city has no algorithm. It has something worse — physical human beings. We would all rather stay online in digital communities we have created, filled with usernames and faces that look and think like us and share our interests and feelings.
Unplugging, however, may be our only hope. Our Facebook friend is not going to bring us dinner when we are sick or water our flowers when we are gone. The actual human being next door just might. That requires we get to know them, appreciate them despite their differences and dare to live a chronological existence with them, where yesterday stays yesterday and tomorrow is something we can look forward to together. Tomorrow has an actual sunrise that we can appreciate with a physical smile on a physical face in a physical place unique to us — not shared by thousands in an Instagram algorithm and hashtag.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Social media.

ERICKSON: The Coming Algorithm Civil War

Social Media

In an op-ed for <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/468404-mark-zuckerberg-is-right-jack-dorsey-is-wrong">The Hill</a> published Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) praised Facebook&#8217;s Mark Zuckerberg and slammed Twitter&#8217;s Jack Dorsey for their diverging approaches to political speech following the social media giants&#8217; recent policy announcements.
&#8220;For those who care about free speech, the last couple weeks saw two major developments from two people who have enormous influence over our public discourse,&#8221; Cruz writes. &#8220;First, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom I have previously criticized, gave an important address in defense of free speech. In it, he explained Facebook&#8217;s new policy that they would not censor political speech, but would instead allow the marketplace of ideas, the back-and-forth of political debate, to resolve public policy disputes.&#8221;
Cruz is referencing in part Zuckerberg&#8217;s widely covered <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-defends-free-speech-amid-political-blowback-i-believe-in-people">speech</a> at Georgetown University two weeks ago in which he came out strongly in defense of free speech. &#8220;We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us or we can decide the cost is simply too great,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.&#8221;
Zuckerberg also made clear in front of Congress the next week that his platform will not be policing political ads.
Dorsey, however, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-twitter-makes-major-move-regarding-speech-from-politicians">announced</a> on Twitter this week that his platform will take a far different approach: it will &#8220;stop all political advertising on Twitter.&#8221;
&#8220;We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally,&#8221; Dorsey announced Wednesday. &#8220;We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons a political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.&#8221;
The developments, Cruz writes, &#8220;come at a time when Big Tech companies, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Google, have established a pattern of arbitrarily silencing voices – overwhelming conservative voices – with whom they disagree.&#8221;
Cruz notes that leftwing politicians and media influencers have condemned Zuckerberg&#8217;s defense of free speech and praised Dorsey&#8217;s new political ad ban, &#8220;urging Facebook and Google to follow suit and jump on board the censorship train by banning political ads as well.&#8221;
Cruz goes on to lay out why banning ads would be &#8220;profoundly harmful,&#8221; including that doing so &#8220;only stands to benefit two groups: incumbent politicians and the mainstream media,&#8221; both of whom have &#8220;huge megaphone[s]&#8221; for spreading their messages.
Not only does a Twitter-like ban give incumbents and the media massive advantage, it effectively suppresses the voice of the average citizen by preventing groups like &#8220;the Sierra Club, the NRA, Planned Parenthood, AIPAC, or a totally new not-for-profit group trying to advocate for a particular idea&#8221; from reaching people.
Cruz additionally argues that Dorsey&#8217;s ban &#8220;only further empowers Silicon Valley billionaires, who already have a stronghold on defining what is truthful or acceptable speech, to now define what is and what is not &#8216;political.'&#8221;
&#8220;It’s up to them to determine where to draw the line – and they won’t stop here,&#8221; the Texas senator warns. &#8220;Banning ads is just the beginning.&#8221; (<a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/468404-mark-zuckerberg-is-right-jack-dorsey-is-wrong">Read Cruz&#8217;s op-ed here</a>.)
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-big-silence-the-left-wages-war-on-free-speech">KLAVAN: The Big Silence: The Left Wages War On Free Speech</a>

Zuckerberg Dorsey

Cruz: Facebook’s Zuckerberg Is Right, Twitter’s Dorsey Is Wrong

Jack Dorsey

Ted Cruz

The very first political video I ever made was entitled “Shut Up.” That’s ten years ago, though it seems like more. The vid is still up on YouTube.
“The left here has been making the ‘shut up’ argument at least since the seventies, when it became clear that all their other arguments had failed,” says my younger and incredibly handsome self. “Since it was the only argument remaining to them, they had to invent different ways to say it. If you pointed out that their weakness allowed the murderous tyranny of Communism to expand, for instance, well, you were a McCarthyite. Shut up. If you proved their leniency toward criminals turned our cities into cesspools, you were a fascist. Shut up. When you pointed out that their welfare policies destroyed black families and created a social disaster of vast proportions, you were a racist, a sexist, uncivil, worse than Hitler, all just different ways of saying: shut up.”
It is sad to see how relentlessly the left has adhered to this approach. With the collapse of their utopia, the Soviet Union, with socialism a drag on life everywhere (yes, including Scandinavia), with leftist Europe sinking under the weight of unrestrained immigration and lack of assimilation and with the presidency of light worker savior Barack Obama an economic and foreign policy failure, leftists, rather than change their minds and their policies, have instead committed to creating a Big Silence meant to hide the truth from all of us, perhaps even from themselves.
This may have once seemed possible given the left’s near monopoly over the means of communication in this country. Hollywood, the news media, the academy — all are nearly wholly populated by leftists. But as the internet and social media began to eat holes in this firewall of disinformation, the left began to fear the truth might reach the people. It was then that their commitment to free speech waned to nothing.
“Free Speech is Killing Us,” headlines a recent story in the leftist New York Times by leftist New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz.
“In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as ‘the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.’ Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress. No one believes that anymore,” Marantz writes.
Translating that from Leftist into Truth, it means: “Free speech was okay when people said things we like, but not now that people are saying other things.” No one seems to have explained to Marantz that that’s the way freedom feels to everyone: great for you, horrific for anyone you disagree with.
Fearful of Donald Trump’s talent for communicating with Americans without the hate-filled filter of the press, the Left and their media have now launched wars on Facebook and Twitter, trying to cut off the flow of information they dislike. Democratic congressmen grilled Mark Zuckerberg on his failure to censor politicians while, suspiciously in concert, 22 separate news outlets launched attacks on Zuck and his site. Twitter, which was exposed by Project Veritas for shadow banning conservative speech, has announced it will no longer allow political or issue ads. Whose voice do you think they’re trying to silence?
Appallingly, journalists themselves have signed on to this assault on the most basic of American values. In an article in the latest City Journal entitled “Journalists Against Free Speech,” John Tierney describes how journalists from the Atlantic, the Times, Huffpo and other venues have endorsed the version of leftist shut-uppery known as Cancel Culture — though they are shocked when anyone tries to use it on them.
And, according to a recent survey by Campaign for Free Speech, these tactics may be working. Fifty-one percent of Americans want to rewrite the First Amendment to exclude “hate speech.”
Of course, you only have to think logically for half a minute to start asking yourself questions. 1) Who decides the definition of hate speech? 2) Why do they want to? 3) What are they trying to hide?
If you answered: 1) Leftists, 2) Because they want power and 3) The fact that leftism leads to slavery&#8230;
&#8230;shut up.

Protesters

KLAVAN: The Big Silence: The Left Wages War On Free Speech

First Amendment

New York Times

On Thursday, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, a devout liberal who wrote the script for the film “The Social Network,” which portrayed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a hard-hearted villain only interested in himself, attacked Zuckerberg in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/opinion/aaron-sorkin-mark-zuckerberg-facebook.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=tw-nytopinion">op-ed for The New York Times</a>, titled: “Aaron Sorkin: An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook isn’t defending free speech, it’s assaulting truth.”
Sorkin wrote, “It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates.”
Sorkin huffed, “I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong … Last year, over 40 percent of Americans said they got news from Facebook. Of course the problem could be solved by those people going to a different news source, or you could decide to make Facebook a reliable source of public information.”
Zuckerberg responded to Sorkin by using Sorkin’s own words from the screenplay for “The American President”:
<blockquote>America isn&#8217;t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, &#8217;cause it&#8217;s gonna put up a fight. It&#8217;s gonna say: You want free speech? Let&#8217;s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who&#8217;s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can&#8217;t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.</blockquote>
In 2014, <a href="https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/the-social-network/241132/mark-zuckerberg-the-social-network-was-kind-of-hurtful">speaking at a Q&amp;A</a> at Facebook&#8217;s headquarters, Zuckerberg said of &#8220;The Social Network,&#8221; for which Sorkin won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, &#8220;I haven&#8217;t spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. I kind of blocked that one out &#8230; I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up. They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot &#8211; they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful &#8230; there were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously.&#8221;
When he won the Oscar for &#8220;The Social Network,&#8221; Sorkin <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VP5mFHl_lY">stated</a>, &#8220;This movie is going to be a source of pride for me every day for the rest of my life.&#8217;
Social media noted Zuckerberg’s takedown of Sorkin:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Oh dear. Flattened. <a href="https://t.co/0EXr1b1C78">https://t.co/0EXr1b1C78</a>
&mdash; Josh Holmes (@HolmesJosh) <a href="https://twitter.com/HolmesJosh/status/1189985929987014657?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Never mess with a human algorithm.
Zuckerberg just slaughtered him in broad daylight. <a href="https://t.co/khQ9tpTMWs">https://t.co/khQ9tpTMWs</a>
&mdash; Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) <a href="https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/1189978113746321408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
There was more:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Icing on the cake is 3 pieces of misinformation in Sorkin&#39;s piece in the New York Times they had to issue corrections for <a href="https://t.co/Sipk9WB5Ec">pic.twitter.com/Sipk9WB5Ec</a>
&mdash; Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) <a href="https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/1189979403192811521?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
The big First Amendment case involving Larry Flynt, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, was about political satire, not pornography. <a href="https://t.co/6x8QvawYPa">https://t.co/6x8QvawYPa</a> <a href="https://t.co/JbCSxNZLAt">pic.twitter.com/JbCSxNZLAt</a>
&mdash; Bill Hammond (@NYHammond) <a href="https://twitter.com/NYHammond/status/1189981368295579649?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
H/T <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/10/31/9-1-1-id-like-to-report-a-murder-mark-zuckerberg-absolutely-shreds-aaron-sorkin-for-claiming-hes-assaulting-truth-by-defending-free-speech/">Twitchy</a>

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg And News Corp CEO Robert Thomson Debut Facebook News

Aaron Sorkin, Who Ripped Mark Zuckerberg In ‘The Social Network,’ Tries Again. Zuckerberg Uses Sorkin’s Own Words Against Him.

Aaron Sorkin

After Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-twitter-makes-major-move-regarding-speech-from-politicians">announced on Wednesday</a> that Twitter would no longer publish political ads, implicitly attacking Facebook, which still accepts political ads and had announced its earnings the same day, by writing, “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought … This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired back defending free speech.
Zuckerberg wrote on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Mark%20Zuckerberg&amp;epa=SEARCH_BOX">Facebook</a>: &#8220;I believe strongly — and I believe that history supports — that free expression has been important for driving progress and building more inclusive societies around the world,&#8221; as well as &#8220;I think we also need to be careful about adopting more and more rules that restrict the way that people can speak and what they can say.&#8221; He also stated, &#8220;In a democracy, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s right for private companies to censor politicians or the news.&#8221;
Some excerpts from Zuckerberg&#8217;s post below:
<blockquote>Today I want to focus on talking about principles. Because from a business perspective, it might be easier for us to choose a different path than the one we&#8217;re taking. So I want to make sure everyone is clear about what we stand for, and why we&#8217;re making some of the decisions we&#8217;re making.
I gave a speech a couple weeks ago about the importance of standing for voice and free expression. I believe strongly — and I believe that history supports — that free expression has been important for driving progress and building more inclusive societies around the world, that at times of social tension there has often been urge to pull back on free expression, and that we will be best served over the long term by resisting this urge and defending free expression.
… But while we work hard to remove content that can cause real danger, I think we also need to be careful about adopting more and more rules that restrict the way that people can speak and what they can say.
Right now, the content debate is about political ads. Should we block political ads with false statements? Should we block all political ads? Google, YouTube and most internet platforms run these same ads, most cable networks run these same ads, and of course national broadcasters are required by law to run them by FCC regulations. I think there are good reasons for this. In a democracy, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s right for private companies to censor politicians or the news. And although I&#8217;ve considered whether we should not carry these ads in the past, and I’ll continue to do so, on balance so far I&#8217;ve thought we should continue …
Some people accuse us of allowing this speech because they think all we care about is making money. That&#8217;s wrong. I can assure you, from a business perspective, the controversy this creates far outweighs the very small percent of our business that these political ads make up. We estimate these ads from politicians will be less than 0.5% of our revenue next year …
Other people say this policy is a part of a broader pattern of us building a system that incentivizes inflammatory content to fuel our business. Again, to the contrary, I think we&#8217;ve done more than any of the other major internet platforms to try to build positive incentives into our systems. We don&#8217;t let any of our News Feed or Instagram Feed teams set goals around increasing time spent on our services. We rank feeds to encourage meaningful social interactions — helping people connect with friends, family and their communities. We have real people come in and tell us what content they saw that was most meaningful to them and sparked valuable discussions, and then we build systems to try to surface that kind of content. We&#8217;ve taken many steps over the years to fight clickbait and polarization, and now we&#8217;re even testing removing like counts in Instagram and Facebook …
Finally, some people say this is just all a cynical political calculation and that we&#8217;re acting in a way we don&#8217;t believe because we&#8217;re just trying to appease conservatives. That&#8217;s wrong too. We face a lot of criticism from both progressives and conservatives. Frankly, if our goal were trying to make either side happy, then we&#8217;re not doing a very good job because I&#8217;m pretty sure everyone is frustrated with us.
There&#8217;s a lot at stake here. We are at a cross-roads not only in our own country, but in the future of the global internet as well. China is building its own internet and media ecosystem that’s focused on very different values. As these systems compete, the question of which nation&#8217;s values will determine what speech is allowed for decades to come really puts into perspective the issues we face today. Because while we may disagree on exactly where to draw the line on specific issues, we at least can disagree. That&#8217;s what free expression is about.
Voice and expression have been important for progress throughout history. They&#8217;ve been important in the fight for democracy worldwide. And I believe that voice and free expression are an important part of the path forward today, and that&#8217;s why our company will continue standing for these principles.</blockquote>
&nbsp;

Twitter’s Dorsey Bans Political Ads, Tweaks Facebook. Zuckerberg Responds By Defending Free Speech.

This past week, the House of Representatives descended into parody, which is hard for it to do. Most members of Congress long ago decided to become parodies of politicians. Now the entire institution is a parody of itself.
The first extraordinary moment was the least noticed. On Oct. 23, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee. This is where I should make a customary disclosure that this past year, Facebook served as a sponsor for my annual Resurgent Gathering.
There to talk about Libra, a cryptocurrency Facebook intends to create with private sector partners, Zuckerberg instead received a spanking from Democrats upset with his lack of knowledge about how many gay people work for him. One member of Congress demanded to know why Zuckerberg did not know how many women, people of color and gay people worked at outside law firms that work for Facebook. Another wanted to know how many black people use Facebook and was outraged when Zuckerberg said Facebook did not track people by race. It is bad to track people by the color of their skin but also bad not to.
Things took a further bizarre turn when members of Congress asked Zuckerberg why they were allowed to lie on Facebook. Zuckerberg said they should not but he was not going to be the hall monitor stopping them. It is really extraordinary that members of Congress want Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of a private company, to block these members of Congress from communicating with their constituents.
Zuckerberg&#8217;s position is that a great many things are subjective; what one person views as a lie, another views as truth. He does not want his company to be the arbiter of the issue. If one person believes boys can become girls — which many view as true these days — and someone else says this is not biologically possible, why should Zuckerberg step in? Likewise, if a Democrat says a Republican voted for something he or she did not vote for, why should Zuckerberg ban the ad instead of simply letting the world see the Democrat is a liar?
It is a truly remarkable turn of events that members of Congress want a private corporation to protect the American public from their own politicians. Perhaps the politicians should censor themselves and be loud and vocal about what they believe are their opponents&#8217; lies instead of having Mark Zuckerberg play teacher on the schoolhouse&#8217;s playground.
The other extraordinary scene played out the same day as a group of Republican congressmen stormed the secure room where Democrats and Republicans were meeting behind closed doors to hear testimony about the impeachment. The Republicans want the matter brought out into the public. While I agree with them, there is precedent for this to happen behind closed doors — including their own Benghazi depositions and the initial impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon, which met behind closed doors for four months before opening up to the public in a formal process.
What was so extraordinary is that about half the Republicans who stormed the room claiming they wanted to know what was happening were Republicans already entitled to be in the room. It raises a question: If these Republicans are so willing to storm the room to disrupt the proceedings, why are they not willing to leak the supposedly exculpatory testimonies from the witnesses?
We should not presume these people are fully respectful of the process. After all, many of them leaked like sieves during the closed-door Benghazi matter. Why were they so willing to leak to damage Hillary Clinton back then but so unwilling to leak exculpatory information to protect President Donald Trump now?
Republicans are right that the process is partisan and flawed. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is a partisan hack who should not be allowed in charge of such a serious investigation. But process arguments will not help. Either the President did demand Ukrainians investigate Joe Biden in order to get money or he did not. Making this about process suggests the Republicans have no real defense to the President&#8217;s behavior.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Mark Zuckerberg.

ERICKSON: Two Extraordinary Moments In Congress

Congress

Impeachment

On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” The Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony regarding Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra. Video and partial transcript below: 
So Maxine Waters questioned Zuckerberg, and she asked specifically about whether Zuckerberg was putting out misinformation. AOC did the same thing, [saying] are you willing to put out campaign ads that have overt lies in them? Zuckerberg is like, Well, not if they&#8217;re suppressing votes, right. I mean, that has national impact, but it&#8217;s not our job to evaluate for our readers true and false [statements] coming from prominent politicians. That&#8217;s their job, like more information is better. 
[But] Maxine Waters can’t handle it because Maxine Waters is not a logical human being. 
<blockquote>ZUCKERBERG: Facebook itself actually does not, it does not fact-check. What we do is, we have feedback that that people in our community don&#8217;t want to see viral hoaxes or —
WATERS: So let me be clear, you do no fact checking on any ads. Is that correct? 
ZUCKERBERG: Chairwoman, what we do is we work with a set of independent fact checkers who —
WATERS: Somebody fact-checks on ads. You contract with someone to do that, is that right? 
ZUCKERBERG: Chairwoman, yes. 
WATERS: And tell me, who is it that they fact-check on? </blockquote>
I mean, she just saying nonsensical questions. She&#8217;s conflating everything right there. The policy of Facebook is that when politicians put out ads, they do not fact-check the ads [in order to take them] down, because they feel the fact checkers are then going to fact-check those ads when it comes to people putting out direct attacks on people that are not politicians. 
<iframe title="The Poop-Flinging Begins | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 882" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vp3LlrVqc14?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
When it comes to political speech, in other words, Facebook takes a pretty broad view, supposedly. When it comes to an advertiser who is advertising a product and they’re slandering somebody, then Facebook won&#8217;t put that up. That seems fairly clear. But these people don&#8217;t understand, even like the basics of how Facebook works. Why? Because they just decided that Big Tech is the bad guy unless they can control big tech, like listen to what they actually want. 
Here&#8217;s some of the dumb — those were the more intelligent questions, believe it or not. You ready for this one? Here’s Al Green, Representative Al Green &#8230; asking how many LGBT people work on the [cryptocurrency] Libra. What? What now? That&#8217;s like saying how many gay people work at the United States Mint. Like what does that have to do with anything? Like, would it make the U.S. dollar less legitimate if there are fewer than 3% of the people who work on the U.S. dollar are gay? Here&#8217;s Green being a complete moron:
<blockquote>GREEN: One would assume that you would know who heads these corporations that are going to be running this global company? How many of them are minorities, Mr. Zuckerberg? 
ZUCKERBERG: Congressman, I do not know off the top of my head. 
GREEN: Are there any members of the LGBTQ-plus community associated with this association, Mr. Zuckerberg? </blockquote>
What? Okay stop, How many transgender people are working on Libra? Like you&#8217;re getting called in from Congress, I feel like Congress may have overstepped its boundaries just a little bit. And listen, I don’t trust Zuckerberg, and I don’t trust anybody — listen, I don’t trust anybody in Big Tech to keep to their promises, but Zuckerberg has at least articulated a standard. 
You think I trust Al Green, who is questioning whether Libra should be able to go forward based on how many people who believe they&#8217;re a member of the opposite sex are working on the tech for Libra? It&#8217;s insanity. You want those people in charge of the country? 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-ben-shapiro-show">Watch “The Ben Shapiro Show” on-demand!</a>

Mark Zuckerberg And Maxine Waters

SHAPIRO: Maxine Waters And Al Green Spout Nonsense At Mark Zuckerberg

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Maxine Waters

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee were slammed online on Wednesday over their &#8220;arrogant,&#8221; &#8220;inaccurate,&#8221; and &#8220;embarrassing&#8221; attacks on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg appeared before the committee for over six hours to answer questions about Facebook&#8217;s proposed cryptocurrency, Libra.
&#8220;Anybody who believes the Democrats are angry at Facebook because they want more free speech should take a look at this,&#8221; Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1187230110060957696">commented</a> on the hearing. &#8220;Democrats are angry at Facebook because they want less free speech. They simply want more Democratic control of the means of informational distribution.&#8221;
Rep. Al Green (D-TX) pressed Zuckerberg about the representation that certain intersectional groups have within the company&#8217;s Libra project.
After asking how many women and how many minorities worked on the project, Green asked Zuckerberg: “Are there any members of the LGBTQ+ community associated with this association, Mr. Zuckerberg?”
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/RepAlGreen?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RepAlGreen</a> is incredulous Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know how many staffers working on Libra are LGBT <a href="https://t.co/K6AJXFIZlp">pic.twitter.com/K6AJXFIZlp</a>
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1187033479395061761?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
Senior RealClearInvestigations writer Mark Hemingway <a href="https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/1187058429812264962">commented</a> on Greens&#8217; remarks, tweeting: &#8220;Gotta love it when bosses make a habit of brushing up on their employees&#8217; sex lives. Really shows you care.&#8221;
&#8220;Is it legal to collect this information?&#8221; Reason staff editor Liz Wolf <a href="https://twitter.com/lizzywol/status/1187046714294853634">tweeted</a>. &#8220;Is it in any way relevant to the employee&#8217;s ability to do their job well? JFC, people.&#8221;
During another portion of questioning, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) suggested, without evidence, that Zuckerberg had &#8220;ruined the lives of many [African-Americans].&#8221;
&#8220;Do you know what percentage of African Americans are on Facebook, in comparison to majority folks?&#8221; Beatty pressed. &#8220;Do you know what the percentages are?&#8221;
Zuckerberg responded: &#8220;I don&#8217;t because we don&#8217;t collect the races of people.&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Democrat Rep. Joyce Beatty (OH) gets nasty with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “You have ruined the lives of many [African-Americans]”
What on earth is she talking about?
This is insane <a href="https://t.co/ugViEELGRO">pic.twitter.com/ugViEELGRO</a>
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1187067044799246336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
&#8220;Holy, this lady almost makes AOC look competent,&#8221; Dave Rubin <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1187155562393243648">commented</a>. &#8220;I actually feel bad for Zuckerberg. That’s how totally ridiculous these congresspeople are.&#8221;
During another embarrassing portion of the hearing, far-left Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) attacked Zuckerberg over the fact that some people in the world do not have a lot of money.
Pressley, like many of her Democrat cohorts, repeatedly pressed Zuckerberg on questions that he was unlikely to know the answers to and then cut him off before he could offer any real response to their questions.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/RepPressley?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RepPressley</a> attacks Zuckerberg, says Libra won’t be useful for people with “virtually no money” <a href="https://t.co/eF4Ad5wW9W">pic.twitter.com/eF4Ad5wW9W</a>
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1187116317486305280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
The most cringeworthy portion of the hearing belonged to Ocasio-Cortez, whose arrogance and desire for censoring her opponents was on full display.
Ocasio-Cortez suggested that she wanted to take advantage of the fact that Facebook tries to not censor political speech from politicians by intentionally lying in her campaign ads, specifically wanting to falsely claim that Republicans supported her <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/green-new-deal-would-cost-93-trillion-or-600g-per-household-study-says">$93 trillion</a> Green New Deal.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) gets nasty with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
AOC&#8217;s arrogance here is absolutely embarrassing <a href="https://t.co/gVTURgvzlk">pic.twitter.com/gVTURgvzlk</a>
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1187104024337629184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
Ocasio-Cortez then leveled bogus attacks against The Daily Caller, a conservative publication that has been critical of Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s often flawed ideas and has often called out her false statements and highlighted corruption that involves her.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a> attacks Zuckerberg for the <a href="https://twitter.com/DailyCaller?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DailyCaller</a> having a role in fact checking. She says the news outlet “has ties to white supremacists.” <a href="https://t.co/wRe74ixjZP">pic.twitter.com/wRe74ixjZP</a>
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1187090234145759242?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
Ocasio-Cortez claimed that The Daily Caller “has ties to white supremacists,” a claim that drew quick response from the leadership at The Daily Caller.
&#8220;Those accusations are rich coming from the leader of the most openly anti-Semitic freshman Congress in modern American history,&#8221; Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll told The Daily Wire. &#8220;Ocasio-Cortez herself employed a staffer who <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/aocs-chief-of-staff-worships-a-servant-of-nazism-and-imperial-japan">lionized Nazis collaborators</a>. Maybe she should spend more time cleaning her room and making her bed before she goes to work.&#8221;
&#8220;Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s call for censorship is typical coming from a party hellbent on annihilating opposing views, in this case one of the only groups of journalists aggressively reporting on her,&#8221; Ingersoll added.
In a tweet, The Daily Caller wrote: &#8220;Ooh did our reporting on her campaign finance shenanigans get under her skin?&#8221;
The tweet linked to a <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/04/ocasio-cortez-justice-democrats/">report</a> by investigative reporter Andrew Kerr titled, &#8220;Ocasio-Cortez And Her Chief Of Staff ‘Could Be Facing Jail Time’ If Their Control Over PAC Was Intentionally Hidden, Former FEC Commissioner Says.&#8221;
The Daily Caller issued a statement on Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s remarks from publisher Neil Patel.
&#8220;Our reporting has directly contributed to putting four members of the &#8216;alt-right&#8217; in prison and sending two more on the run, at great personal risk to our reporters on the ground,&#8221; Patel wrote. &#8220;And as a minority-owned and minority-run news company with a diverse staff — including many African-American, Jewish, Asian, and other minority employees — any allegation that our company is in league with white supremacy is offensive.&#8221;
&#8220;We have denounced white supremacy in the past and are happy to do so again,&#8221; Patel continued. &#8220;We share nothing with them and they aren&#8217;t welcome at our company. For a sitting member of Congress to knowingly repeat such spurious allegations — especially during these polarized, violent times — is not just despicable, it endangers our staff.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a>’s statement is dangerous on a fundamental level, not just because it is inaccurate and damaging.
I have a diverse staff — in politics, race, and creed — and when lunatics roaming the streets think its okay to get violent, this kind of allegation puts my reporters at risk. <a href="https://t.co/W3tNY7Ivkz">https://t.co/W3tNY7Ivkz</a>
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) <a href="https://twitter.com/GPIngersoll/status/1187179990636519425?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 24, 2019</a></blockquote>
Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s attacks on Zuckerberg predictably earned the strongest negative reaction online.
Dave Rubin <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1187137659140890624">tweeted</a>: &#8220;She’s absolutely awful. Zuckerberg tries to calmly explain that allowing people to decide for themselves is sometimes what’s right. That’s foreign to progressive groupthink.&#8221;
Tim Pool <a href="https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187140327922130945">tweeted</a>: &#8220;AOC just proved exactly why Mark Zuckerberg is right to not police truthfulness of political speech Poynter runs the fact checking approval for Facebook, she is wrong and is smearing the Daily Caller Should Facebook ban AOC from saying this on FB?&#8221;
Guy Benson <a href="https://twitter.com/guypbenson/status/1187134342700687360">tweeted</a>: &#8220;Can confirm: White supremacy was not joked about, made light of, espoused, or even mentioned at the &#8216;far right&#8217; / Zuckerberg dinner party I attended. What a performance she put on.&#8221;
Allie Beth Stuckey <a href="https://twitter.com/conservmillen/status/1187113825860046848">tweeted</a>: &#8220;My gosh. @AOC tries very hard to seem fierce and operates solely out of a desire for viral clips. These questions are not at all interesting or clever, and she is cringefully arrogant.&#8221;

Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats Skewered After Embarrassing Attacks On Zuckerberg

The Daily Caller

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a defiant speech on Thursday in which he highlighted the importance of free speech in response to critics&#8217; demands for heightened content auditing amid the 2020 presidential election cycle.
&#8220;I&#8217;ve focused on building services to do two things: give people voice and bring people together,&#8221; Zuckerberg said while addressing a crowd at Georgetown University. &#8220;These two simple ideas — voice and inclusion — go hand in hand.&#8221;
&#8220;We&#8217;ve seen this throughout history, even if it doesn&#8217;t feel that way today. More people being able to share their perspectives has always been necessary to build a more inclusive society,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;And our mutual commitment to each other — that we hold each others&#8217; right to express our views and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want — is how we make progress together.&#8221;
Zuckerberg&#8217;s remarks come as the tech executive has been facing blowback for how it handles falsehoods published on the social network. Facebook announced in late-September that the site would refrain from fact-checking or moderating politicians&#8217; speech.
Democrats have been especially vocal in their opposition to the approach; they have taken particular issue with Facebook&#8217;s decision not to censor an ad from President Donald Trump&#8217;s re-election campaign that accused former Vice President Joe Biden of using foreign aid as a bargaining chip to force the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating a company of which his son was a board member.
&#8220;People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures in our society,&#8221; Zuckerberg said. &#8220;People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences.&#8221;
&#8220;I understand the concerns that people have about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people&#8217;s hands,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;It&#8217;s part of this amazing expansion of voice that we&#8217;ve experienced through law, culture and now technology as well.&#8221;
Zuckerberg noted that individuals are increasingly falling subject to the &#8220;dangerous&#8221; belief that accomplishing their own idealized political outcome is more important than allowing their fellow Americans to have their own voice.
Highlighting examples throughout history that illustrates both how the escalation in voices accelerates unification and the censorship of voices hinders progress, Zuckerberg invoked Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as events such as the American founding and Civil Rights movement, the worldwide spread of democracy, and the Vietnam War protests.
&#8220;So, giving people a voice and broader inclusion go hand in hand, and the trend has been towards greater voice over time,&#8221; the Facebook CEO said. &#8220;But there&#8217;s also a counter-trend, which is that in times of social turmoil, our impulse is often to pull back on free expression because we want the progress that comes from free expression, but we don&#8217;t want the tension.&#8221;
Set off by recent events such as the 2008 financial crisis, the boost in globalization, and even worldwide migration, Zuckerberg argued that Americans are again facing a social tension heightening impulses to pull back on free expression.
&#8220;In the face of these tensions, once again a popular impulse is to pull back from free expression. We&#8217;re at another cross-roads,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.&#8221;
He further expressed his pride in representing a company which values the American tradition of free expression, but noted that free speech is also not absolute, especially when that freedom infringes on another individual&#8217;s rights. He also examined some of the difficulties in determining what should constitute acceptable speech on the social media platform.
&#8220;The future depends on all of us. Whether you like Facebook or not, we need to recognize what is at stake and come together to stand for free expression at this critical moment,&#8221; Zuckerberg said. &#8220;I believe in giving people a voice because, at the end of the day, I believe in people.&#8221;
&#8220;And as long as enough of us keep fighting for this, I believe that more people&#8217;s voices will eventually help us work through these issues together and write a new chapter in our history — where from all of our individual voices and perspectives, we can bring the world closer together,&#8221; he added.

Mark Zuckerberg Talks Free Expression At Georgetown University

Mark Zuckerberg Defends Free Speech Amid Political Blowback: ‘I Believe In People’

Constitution

On Wednesday, the &#8220;Internet Accountability Project,&#8221; a nonprofit taking aim at the &#8220;bad acts&#8221; of Big Tech, officially launched.
&#8220;Our Mission,&#8221; the organization&#8217;s <a href="https://www.theiap.org/">site</a> reads, &#8220;is to lend a conservative voice to the calls for federal and state governments to rein in Big Tech before it is too late.&#8221;
With rising anxieties about tech industry giants like Google and Facebook violating privacy standards and engaging in documented cases of bias against conservatives, the nonprofit seeks to hold such companies accountable.
&#8220;We are conservatives who are alarmed by the role Big Tech plays in our society. We are concerned by the political and economic harms Big Tech platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are inflicting on Americans,&#8221; IAP says. &#8220;These harms include negative content, conservative bias, privacy violations, anticompetitive conduct, and employee abuses. We formed Internet Accountability Project in order to speak out against Big Tech before it is too late.&#8221;
The advocacy group is headed by heavy-hitting conservative players Mike Davis and Rachel Bovard. Leading the charge, Davis, as previously outlined by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47431/article-iii-project-launches-promising-pro-trump-josh-hammer">The Daily Wire</a>, is the founder of judicial advocacy group <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47431/article-iii-project-launches-promising-pro-trump-josh-hammer">A3P</a>; he <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrdavis/">clerked</a> for Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court and recently served as chief nominations counsel to former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) during the bitter confirmation hearings of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Bovard, who serves as IAP&#8217;s senior advisor, is no slouch, either. The 35-year-old already has over a decade of experience fighting for conservative policy in Washington under her belt. She was named one of National Journal&#8217;s Most Influential Women in Washington under 35 in 2013 and has served in both the House and Senate in various roles, including legislative director for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
&#8220;We just launched the Internet Accountability Project today, and we are blown away by the overwhelming support we are receiving, especially among conservatives,&#8221; Davis told The Daily Wire on Wednesday. &#8220;We represent hardworking Americans who are fed up with the Big Tech bullies — like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter — and their &#8216;bad acts,&#8217; including profiting from human-sex trafficking, revenge-porn, the opioid epidemic and drug addiction, terrorism, and other forms of human misery, along with engaging in egregious business practices like snooping, spying, political bias against conservatives, employee abuses, and anticompetitive conduct.&#8221;
In a press release sent to The Daily Wire, Davis further blasted Big Tech. &#8220;Enough is enough,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s time to re-boot Big Tech, upgrade and reformat the sweetheart laws that protect them, and enforce the antitrust, consumer-and employee-protection, and similar laws already on the books.&#8221;
&#8220;We are pleased that 50 state attorneys general, along with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, have taken the bold and courageous steps of investigating Big Tech&#8217;s &#8216;bad acts,&#8217; and we will support other government officials in their efforts to investigate and hold Big Tech accountable,&#8221; he added.
Bovard stressed to The Daily Wire that there must be accountability, and soon.
&#8220;When it comes to Big Tech, we are currently dealing with huge and unaccountable corporations, awash in billions of dollars, who own the private data of hundreds of millions of Americans, and control our cultural and political conversation in unprecedented ways,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Our public policy has simply not kept pace with where we now find ourselves. The ability to have an honest conversation about what Big Tech is doing to our cultural development, our ability to engage with one another, as well as its impact on the next generation, is well within the domain of policy makers. We are excited to work toward facilitating this necessary conversation.&#8221;
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Bovard emphasized that it&#8217;s &#8220;critical to protect innovation and ingenuity in the tech space, but to do so mindfully.&#8221;
&#8220;Big Tech should not be allowed to become the arbiters of communication in America without input from citizens and policy makers,&#8221; the statement reads. &#8220;It is important for those on the Right to begin discussing whether our public policy has kept pace with Big Tech, who now owns our data, much of our privacy, and in many cases, is pulling the levers of our political communication. IAP is here to help facilitate that conversation.&#8221;
In June, President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48899/watch-trump-slams-tech-giants-bias-censorship-hank-berrien">accused</a> social media giants like Google and Twitter of attempting to &#8220;rig&#8221; the 2016 presidential election and suggested the companies be sued.
&#8220;I tell you what, they should be sued, because what&#8217;s happening with the bias — and now you see it, with that executive yesterday from Google, the hatred for the Republicans. It&#8217;s not even like, &#8216;Gee, let&#8217;s lean Democrat.&#8217; The hatred! And actually, you know, I heard that all during my election. It&#8217;s hard that I won. They were swamping us with negative stuff,&#8221; the president posted to Twitter.
As reported by The Daily Wire, Attorney General William Barr spearheaded probing efforts into such big tech platforms for potential antitrust violations about a month later.
&#8220;Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands. The department&#8217;s antitrust review will explore these important issues,&#8221; Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said at the time.
According to a press release from the IAP, initial conservative partners active in the group&#8217;s fight against Big Tech include Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), Human Events, and Publius Lex, which is led by attorney Harmeet Dhillon. &#8220;IAP&#8217;s team also includes top surrogates who have served in the White House, Justice Department, Congress, and conservative movement,&#8221; the release noted.

Menu