Can you believe this?
Facebook is a giant fraud.
Facebook apparently has an agreement with the conservative Weekly Standard to fact check the news.
At first, I thought this was fake news but it has been reported by many news sites.
Why not partner with other advocacy groups with a partisan agenda?
The Broad Foundation or the Walton Family Foundation on education?
The Tobacco Institute on smoking science?
Trump on Trump?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good God! What is going through their minds?
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That is a start..
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Scratch that comment it was for the last post
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#TurnOffFacebook
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I keep being amazed?
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I am frankly sick of Facebook and its support of billionaires over all the rest of us. Is there another social media site that people could switch to?
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This is probably because of the Campbell Brown/Dan Senor connection; Brown works at Facebook and her husband Senor, famed Iraq hawk and PR head for the US/Iraq occupation, is close to Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard. Apparently Senor started a think tank with Kristol and also writes for the Weekly Standard. I knew it was trouble when FB hired Brown, who is known for purveying fake news, to head their media partnership effort.
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Facebook has decided that all money is green so they are not going to be concerned about the political leanings of the client. “60 Minutes” just did a story on Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale. His background is in advertising, and he had worked for the Trumps before. He went on a mission to find out how to use micro-targeting of campaign advertisements on Facebook. Facebook staffers were actually embedded in the Trump campaign two or three days per week to maximize the “personalization”(based on collected data) of the advertisements. Apparently the same service was offered to the Clinton campaign and was declined.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-ads-russia-and-the-trump-campaigns-secret-weapon/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=43264285
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retired teacher,
THANK YOU. WOW and OY!
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Since when are Snopes & PolitiFact ‘liberal-leaning sites’ that need to be corrected by Bill Kristol’s [former] rag?
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I shall continue to check in once or twice a month w/FB friends who like me are oldsters using it as a way to update far-flung relatives w/ family news & photos. Never ever used it as a place to connect or activate politically.
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I agree. Facebook is a nice way to connect with people you don’t hear from often…. relatives, former students. But from what my own children tell me and the kids in school say, it’s been eclipsed by other forms of social media. (ie. it’s “so yesterday”….to use a phrase that is, well, so yesterday.)
I’ve sometimes wondered if Facebook is the CB radio of our era. (Though I don’t think anyone ever accused CB radio of influencing a major election back in the 1970s)
BTW… to vent for one moment: I always think it’s kind of funny how so many rough and tough, survival of the fittest, don’t be a “snowflake” conservatives are always whining about how life is so unfair to them. Ooooo, the “mainstream” media doesn’t like us….ooooo, all those mean college professors….oooo, poor people want to take our millions of dollars….etc…. etc… ad nauseam. Maybe part of it is the conservatives whined so much that they finally wore Facebook down -kind of like a bunch of brats pitching a fit in the supermarket candy aisle?
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My teen daughter told me a few years ago that kids don’t use FB…it’s for old people only! The kids dump something as soon as the adults take over. When enough adults start using snapchat and instagram, the kids will find new platform for sharing. It’s akin to pulling the telephone into the closet to have a private discussion.
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Of course FB is a fraud. First they said there was no way the Russians placed ad on their network, then suddenly – they admitted to getting ads from Russia. They censor selectively and allow others to post away without punishment. That 60 minute piece did it for me. They are total liars.
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Wonder if FB people should all switch over to… MySpace?
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They’ve decided to join the side that is currently winning. I think it’s as simple as that. Having been infiltrated by the right wing/oligarchs/Ed tech and other corporate parasites probably set the tone of the whispering campaign that led to this. The NRA used to be a reputable group till they were taken over in a surprise move by right wing interests.
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Would there have been an issue if they’d partnered with Media Matters or the Huffington Post???
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Yes. The distinction here, however, is that this is a coordinated effort to line up the political arm of the executive branch with a propaganda arm of an extremist political agenda to create the appearance of independent, nonpartisan public information. Look up Gleichschaltung if you don’t get it.
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I think FB is supposed to monitor relations with media–that’s Campbell Brown’s job, by the way. Monitoring is not defined as allying.
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“Trump on Trump?”
It’s already been done:
(GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING)
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I bet Trump made that boast, not Marla
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The fact that it made the front page of a widely read newspaper in NYC is pretty disgusting. Bet he has it framed somewhere.
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Yes! That’s what I was getting at. I realise now I wasn’t clear.
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Trump, boast? Hard to imagine.
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It’s interesting that in the 60 Minutes piece on Brad Parscale and Facebook that he shimmies & shakes and evades when asked directly about Russian intervention in the election. He discounts it. Asked about where all the pro-trump Twitter ads came from, he says, “everyday people in America, who thought they were trying to help. I don’t know.”
A leading national security organization found at least 600 Russian-liked Twitter accounts. Facebook says it found about 3300 ads tied to Russian entities…there are likely many more.
Parscale claims to have deep knowledge about almost everything else. Except, of course, whether or not any of his ads were ugly or racist or hateful, even though Trump said lots of mean, ugly, racist, hateful and outright false things, and Parscale says “We mirrored certain things that he would say, mainly things he said in rallies.” It was at these rallies that Trump made some of his vilest statements.
So, the dude’s credibility is a problem. A big problem.
The biggest problem though, is what Parscale achieved through Facebook and Twitter.
We’ll all be dealing with the ramifications of that for a while…..
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Good piece on the really dismal record of the “online learning” ed reformers all promote:
“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has touted online learning as a school-choice solution for rural America, saying that virtual charter schools provide educational options that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
But in Pennsylvania, an early adopter where more than 30,000 kids log into virtual charter schools from home most days, the graduation rate is a dismal 48 percent. Not one virtual charter school meets the state’s “passing” benchmark. And the founder of one of the state’s largest virtual schools pleaded guilty to a tax crime last year.”
They’re not just pushing this in charters- they sell it as “course choice” in rural public schools, enthusiastically cheer-led by the US Department of Education.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/08/education-betsy-devos-online-charter-schools-poor-results-243556
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Such a foul stench. There is no social interaction in these virtual schools, which is crucial to child and adolescent development.
No peer to peer or teacher to student interactions.
DeVos to education is like ammonia to bleach.
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And, regarding the election, there’s this:
“Russia has exploited social media networks to target current and former U.S. military personnel with propaganda, conspiracy theories and other misinformation, achieving ‘significant and persistent interactions’ over Twitter during a one-month period last spring, a British research team found…Facebook disclosed last month that a company tied to a Russian ‘troll farm,’ where operatives use cyber skills to spread misinformation, set up fake accounts that bought 3,000 election-related ads. It said 75 percent of the ads, which the company said may have popped up in the Facebook newsfeeds of as many as 10 million people, focused on divisive issues such as immigration, gun rights and gay rights…The researchers noted that they couldn’t track all of the relevant content, in part because the limited data publicly available from Twitter and Facebook does not include fake accounts that the two companies detected and closed…Spokespeople for Twitter and Facebook declined to comment on the study.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article177744986.html
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And this:
“Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election…The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook — a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far…”
Regarding the ads on Facebook:
“At least one outside researcher has said that the influence of Russian disinformation on Facebook is much greater than the company has so far acknowledged and encompasses paid ads as well as posts published on Facebook pages controlled by Russian agents. The posts were shared hundreds of millions of times, said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/09/google-uncovers-russian-bought-ads-on-youtube-gmail-and-other-platforms/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_google-705am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f0d7e29fe427
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Why any of this would surprise anyone is a mystery.
Zuckerberg has never had any concern with truth.
My goodness, his whole company is based on stolen intellectual property — and his lies about it.
What makes anyone think he will now behave any differently than he did at the beginning?
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He won’t, unless he’s forced to come clean about the Russia stuff. Facebook should release the Russian ads to the public.
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I was thinking the same thing. He’s not “following the trend” for the money. He creates the trends. Look at his most recent foray into the world of education.
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It’s not as simple as we would like to believe https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/540192/
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Thanks for the link, Michael. Important information.
The internet is like face to face discourse on steroids. People are most likely to listen to and believe what they want to believe.
One of the largest impediments to communication comes in the area of listening. Especially when the subject matter involves different points of view. Too often the listener is already forming a response WHILE the speaker is still in the process of stating his/her point. The desire to “win” or be “right” blocks the communication process.
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So remind me again why Zuck is considered a “liberal”?
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Prolly because he is so liberal with the truth.
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Spin, spin, spin
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Chris Hedges on ELITES LIE: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/elites-no-credibility-left-interview-journalist-chris-hedges/
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