Maria Bustillos writes here about “the smallness of Mark Zuckerberg” and why you should not give your personal information to Facebook.
She thinks he is running for President. The current occupant of the White House has demonstrated that anyone can do it and win, regardless of qualifications.
Beware.
We should have learned from Trump not to entrust our democracy to a billionaire with an inflated ego.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Do you really believe that anyone can run for the Presidency and win? If being wealthy were the only requirement, we would have a president H. Ross Perot, and a president Steve Forbes. Both of these individuals had almost unlimited financial resources.
We have had wealthy presidents before. George Washington did not have a pocket watch, or a window to throw it out of, until he married the wealthiest widow in Virginia. John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover were wealthy, and donated their presidential salaries to charity.
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Charles,
Having a wealthy president is not a problem.
Having an ignorant president who is a liar and a braggart, a vulgarian who makes no pretense of having morals or ethics, is a problem.
Can’t wait until he puts Sean Hannityand Bill O’Reilly in the Cabineet.
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Another reason not to trust him is that Facebook, along with Twitter and probably others, is complicit in censorship efforts by our current government. Under the guise of trying to shut down alt-right abuse, they are quietly shutting down all forms of dissenting opinion. It is so easy for them to do.
I am not usually a conspiracy theorist type but the claims seem very plausible… lots of articles out there regarding this… google “facebook censorship” and “twitter censorship” (before that gets censored too) so you can decide for yourself.
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This is what the fake news “crisis” is all about – creating a reason – even a demand – for the government (currently the Trump administration, but it will be equally available to any future administrations, including Democrats) to swoop in and decide for us what is “truth” and therefore allowable vs. what is “fake” and therefore must be eliminated. If this isn’t state-controlled media, I don’t know what is.
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I am not defending Zuckerberg or these other billionaires but Facebook and Twitter are private commercial sites and they can do whatever they want as regards censorship. They are not news sites, they are places where all kinds of people post all kinds of things from the benign to the malignant. I will admit that I have participated in Facebook on a limited basis to connect with out of state relatives; I don’t get Twitter at all. I also use email, snail mail, the phone and in the flesh, 3D visits. One amazing thing about Facebook is that I found people that I knew from decades ago. All that being said, I absolutely do not want to see a President Zuckerberg, Bezos, Dell, Gates, Broad, etc., ad nauseam.
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You act like government and big corporations are separate entities rather than the former being a wholly owned subsidiary of the latter.
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I post tons of anti-Trump cartoons and articles on my Facebook page. Not to mention pro public school comments, articles, links to Diane’s blog and videos of Diane’s lectures. I haven’t been blocked yet for advocating for an ultra progressive agenda.
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You’re not a news source.
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Facebook is not a news organization, it is an aggregator. If people are stupid enough to believe everything that they are fed – no wonder the stream of fluff is called feed – it is their problem. Unlike some other countries, this country does not (yet?) block dissenting information. One who wants to get enlightened can get truthful info, others prefer to be fed like geese or cows.
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I had a nightmare last night that Zuckerberg would run as an independent in 2020 against the party nominees Booker and Kasich.
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Greg,
That is truly a nightmare!
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Long before I opened a Facebook account (I’ve now come and gone three times on Facebook, this last time for good), I saw Leslie Stahl interview Mr. Zuckerberg on “60 Minutes.” I was shocked that someone so callow could be as arrogant and self-satisfied as he appeared to be. I didn’t know anything about Facebook at that point, so I didn’t know what to think.
Now that we’ve seen Facebook used for utterly sinister ends–subverting elections rather than simply gathering data on users in order to advertise directly to them–I have a very different perception of Mark Zuckerberg: I think he’s a self-important megalomaniac who has a billion dollars. He apparently thinks his riches endows him with the latitude to make social policy.
Which is pretty scary.
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Zuckerberg does have “only” a billion dollars. He has many billions.
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As Sen. Everett Dirksen once reportedly said: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
While Zuckerberg does have a virtual company, he also has real money.
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He is also deserting tbe ship as fast as his little rat feet will take him in order to convert his fake money to real money
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The interesting thing is that if people wanted to, they could use Facebook against Zuckerberg, by flooding the pages with total fabrications (fake names, fake families, fake views, fake events, fake everything)– even more than exists right now.
If millions of people did this, there would be so much garbage that the site would lose all value and even the data would become useless to Zuckerberg because it would be impossible to know what was real and what was not.
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Basically the equivalent of filling out a survey with totally bogus information.
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I use Facebook in a VERY LIMITED way. I use it to connect to a few sewing forums and for a few of my children’s activities. I gave very limited information and changed some information about myself when I set up my account. In fact, I was deleted when the whole Russian Ad/fake account thing went down. I don’t friend anyone, I don’t post pictures, I don’t post anything to my account. It is a necessary evil in today’s world if you wish to connect to others with similar interests.
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Not incidentally, Zuckerberg himself was so concerned that the credibility of his site would suffer from the perception that it was “fake” that he wrote a piece in which he assured people that
“99% of what people see on Facebook is authentic”
Not sure how Zuckerberg knows that, since his algorithms could not even identify a few thousand fake Russian ads, but even if the 99% claim is accurate (which I seriously doubt) the site lives or dies based on perception, not reality.
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Just what are you suggesting, SomeDAM? And how can I help?
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Maybe he can go work for Betsy in the department of education and put his expertise to work or for Trump. He has billions off the backs of real people. She is destroying public education and he is destroying democracy. They are both sides of the same coin
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Well, said, Beata.
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Zuckerberg did hire Campbell Brown, the former news anchor, to keep watch for fake news. Brown generated quite a lot of fake news by loudly claiming that unions protect sexual predators in the schools and that tenure is the enemy of equal educational opportunity. She even launched lawsuits in California, Minnesota, and New Jersey to strike down tenure laws but has had no luck in the courts.
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Well, hiring Campbell Brown to to find fake news was a smart move.
All she needed to do was hold up a mirror.
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Zuckerberg should NEVER be trusted. And yes, he would like to run for office and OWN Kaua’i as well as have control over ALL education in this country. He’s another Bill Gates and we know about Bill. KA-CHING.
Zuckerberg thinks this is HIS time. Please don’t support Zuckerberg and FB’s FACELESS algorithms used for this insidious electronic bulletin board.
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It is the system, not personalities. All the corporations as people scam. Rolling back environment protection laws. If you think Elon Musk is better, think again: his stunt with the space car shows that he does not care about the environment and spits on scientific community. They are all the same. The system makes them the same. Or, the other way around: only the same type of personality can make it big in the current system.
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Not to put too dull a point on it, but people are generally good; billionaires are generally bad.
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All of these technology CEO’s believe they know how to do everything they are gods, education, they know how to cure famine etc etc. Mayors, and educators have taken there money i.e. Newark New Jersey I million dollars to educate children. Money went to administrators from New York City and the destruction of the public school system, the previous mayor has taken money from Betsy for his campaign for years.
All these non educators believing the hype and our next generation being sold off for there media exposure, and enrichments of others
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The main reason you should never trust Zuckerberg: Fakebook.
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“Fakebook”
Faker friends
And faker views
Faker trends
And faker news
Fakerbook is all the rage
Fakers all on every page
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“Here he is, smiling, having quite recently decided he’s “no longer an atheist” in the Charleston church where Dylann Roof killed nine people.”
A definite must in American politicking-not being an atheist. Gotta have one’s “Come to Jesus” moment.
Shows just how self-serving the Zuke is. And it shows just how limited in thinking (can’t go electing any atheists now can we?) the American voters are.
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He never actually was an atheist.
He has always worshipped Lucre, the god of money.
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Hail, Mammon!
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Here is an eye-opener and mind-blower. Leaders of the following corporations have formed the “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.”
Partners are Facebook, Google and Google’s Deep Mind, Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft.
I thought this was basically a PR campaign born in 2016, and designed to put a positive spin on AI while forestalling legitimate and increasing criticism of these mega corporations, especially data mining and profiling and steering behavior on an unprecedented scale, largely out of public view.
The Mission Statement is here: Harness ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE for solutions to some of humanity’s most challenging problems…. education, climate change, food, health and wellbeing, transportation, inequality.
The Founding partners offer brief pitches for their mission and products/services.
Amazon offers “personalized recommendations,” Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa and more.
APPLE—iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud.
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., says its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google offers Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Chrome, and YouTube.
DeepMind acquired by Google in 2014 “is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how.”
Facebook says its mission is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) and Applied Machine Learning is discussed at research.fb.com.
IBM says, in effect, that WATSON is the platform for solutions, with proof implied by its use “in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries around the world.”
Microsoft claims to be “the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet….”
Since this Partnership was announced in 2016, the “founding partners” have acquired a very mixed bag of other partners. Some seem to be eager for the PR, some have longstanding records of doing good works. The Partnership has grown rapidly, with several online job positing to manage whatever the following companies, non-profits, think tanks, and labs may expect from signing on as “partners.”
Here you go, as of today—believers in the use of “Artificial Intelligence” to Benefit People and Society. “
The Association For The Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; Acenture (rre-Invented after Enron); American Civil Liberties Union; Affectiva (Emotion Recognition Tech); The Artificial Intelligence Forum of New Zealand; The AI Now Institute at New York University; The (Paul) Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2); Amnesty International; Article 19 (Freedom to speak and know); Association for Computing Machinery; Center for Democracy & Technology; Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence; Center for Democracy & Technology; Center for Information Technology Policy Princeton University; Centre for Internet And Society, India (Cis); Leverhulme Centre for The Future Of Intelligence (University ff Cambridge, UK); Cogitai, Inc.; Data & Society; The Digital Asia Hub; Doteveryone (London Think Tank); Ebay; Element AI; The Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (Germany) The Future ff Humanity Institute, (University Of Oxford, Uk) Future ff Life Institute; The Future ff Privacy Forum; The Hastings Center; Hong Kong University ff Science And Technology Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering; Human Rights Watch, Intel, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Santa Clara University; Mckinsey & Company; Nvidia Nvidia’s (Invented GPU In 1999, computer “brain “that can perceive and understand the world;”Omidyar Network (Ebay Founder, SIB Investments); OpenAI; Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford, UK; Salesforce (Cloud computing, Einstein AI); SAP (predictive analytics); Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.; Tufts University Hri Lab; Ucl Engineering (Uk): UNICEF’s Office of Innovation; University of Washington Tech Policy Lab; Upturn; XPRIZE (Google Lunar XPRIZE, NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, Global Learning XPRIZE, Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE); IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, Water Abundance XPRIZE, Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE); Zaland Technology (Germany, Ireland, Finland).
https://www.partnershiponai.org/partners/
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I hope all the negative publicity surrounding Cambridge Analytica will alert people to the potential abuse and shady dealings surrounding for profit Big Data. These big companies with lots of money will do everything in their power to prevent the creation of laws protecting the privacy rights of unsuspecting people. It will take several scandals to wake people up. Thanks for your research.
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Scandals, yes. How INTERESTING to see legislators calling out Zuckerberg personally on national news yesterday now that the data-mining game is being exposed.
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Facebook stock is down 7% today so far. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/18/facebook-failing-zuckerberg-and-sandberg-absent-commentary.html
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executives are selling shares like crazy, including a plan by Mark Zuckerberg to sell almost $13 billion worth of shares by mid-2019.”
What was that saying about rats and ships?
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Best news I have heard in a while!
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We should have learned from Trump not to entrust our democracy to a billionaire with an inflated ego…
We should also learn from USMC/Teacher Lofthouse about “our democracy”.
“the U.S. Constitution does not support a democracy. It supports a Constitutional Republic ruled by law.”
“If I stood on a busy corner in New York City and shouted one thousand times that the United States was a democracy that would not change the fact that the United States is a Constitutional Republic ruled by law and the three branches of the federal government were created to support that law, the US Constitution.”
While privilege (corporate tax breaks, for-profit charter schools, bank bail-outs,
you name it) is sanctioned by LAW, the US is a constitutional republic, ruled by
law, and the three branches, continue to support the US Constitution…
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A republic is a representative democracy. Every president that I have ever heard or read about has described America as a republic and/or democracy; they have used the terms interchangeably. The US is not a pure democracy but it is a democratic republic/representative democracy.
From wikipedia: In American English, the definition of a republic refers specifically to a form of democracy in which elected individuals represent the citizen body[2] and exercise power according to the rule of law under a constitution, including separation of powers with an elected head of state, referred to as a constitutional republic[4][5][6][7] or representative democracy.
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Sadly, representatives can be bought. “Reform” has shown us how pervasive the problem is.
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Or Jeff Bezos, for that matter. If you really want to be scared, remember that thanks to Amazon, newsstands are non-existent in most of the USA, and bookstores are few and far between. Print newspapers and newsmagazine are drying up and dying. Amazon, for all intents and purposes, is now our main resource for purchasing reading material. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post! Most of us rely on easily manipulated digital resources for the majority of our news and information. If you’ve ordered from Amazon, they have your personal data. And more and more, they possess the ability to control our access to information. They have acquired multiple companies whose products are designed to quietly spy on us–Alexa and Ring, for starters–as well as companies whose software products match, identify, and catalogue digital and print images; and others that do the same to 3-dimensional objects (including humans!).
When I go back to proofread what I wrote, above, it does sound pretty paranoid, even to me! But it’s all true, and the more research I do, the more dots get connected, and an increasingly clearer picture emerges.
I think I’m going to read up on printing presses now. Might prove to be useful in the relatively near future. 😳
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Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
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It’s time to join the paranoia party. Those giant companies are out to get us and stack the deck against us.
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The billionaires are rarely concerned about anything other than their bottom line!
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Never forget that 1) if an online program or app is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold, and 2) when asked if his fellow Harvard classmates really had supplied him with personal information, Zuckerberg replied, “Yeah, the dumb f$#ks.”
And why on earth would anyone involved with raising or teaching children have anything to do with a person (if indeed he is human, though I have my doubts) whose slogan was “Move Fast and Break Things,” and was only changed because people gave the company a hard time about it.
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No different from TV, just more targeted. Wait for ATSC-3 to start rolling out, they will be collecting viewers’ profiles and showing them targeted ads just like online. There is no way back. Everybody is being tracked. Facebook just one of many. The whole idea of personalization hinges on tracking.
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There’s really something wrong with these people.
This piece is titled “there’s more to life than test scores”
It’s about testing kids for “social and emotional skills” – measuring them.
The goal seems to be to make every moment of every child’s life as grim and joyless as humanly possible. They can’t quit measuring people! They can’t stop themselves! You show them a kid and they’ll assign a score to that kid!
View at Medium.com
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Here’s the great “innovative” testing schemes ed reformers have planned for your kids in school today:
“Performance tasks or games. In this approach, respondents are asked to complete a task or play a game. Their performance on the task or game provides a measure of their SE skills. Perhaps the most famous example is the so-called marshmallow test of self-control in which children are given one marshmallow and are told they will be given a second marshmallow if they refrain from eating the first marshmallow within a fixed time period. Performance on the marshmallow test is highly correlated with later SAT scores.”
God almighty. The plan is to conduct incessant online testing to determine “emotional skills”
First we have to test ed reformers, who are apparently completely lacking in these skills themselves.
I love how stupid they think kids are- they are going to know this test isn’t a “game” from a mile away.
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We don’t need no “education”.
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Miami-Dade Pubic Schools uses Facebook Workforce
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Sitting here, reading all your comments above. And, I noticed that I have a good ‘ole newsstand version of an op-ed piece from last weekend’s NY Times still sitting on my computer printer: “You Tube, the Great Radicalizer”, March 11, 2018. Must’ve meant to do something with it at school…. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html
So, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Google…if they can all be described as dangerous, could it be that the internet itself is dangerous? I don’t know….just wondering. And, if so, what then??
I get the feeling I should be paying a lot more attention to how places like China are using all this new technology to control its citizens.
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P.S. Of course, when I fell out of tree a few summers ago and was sitting here with multiple broken bones and never saw an actual doctor on the day the hospital sent me on my way home…..it was the internet that gave me comforting answers about my busted up shoulder. People posting online were more of a help to me than the health care “system” that had just processed me, like a piece of sausage. What the hell….?!?
And, yeah, a tree. Funny, how if I’d fallen off a ladder or a roof or even a moving car it wouldn’t get the same reaction. Ahhhh….to be a human….
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Here’s an article for you-How China Wants to Rate Its Citizens:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-china-wants-to-rate-its-citizens
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Thanks. Missed this one when it was in.
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Diane,
The stock for FB loss was around 30 Billion.
Cambridge Analytics turns out to be one of the operations, one of the techniques that the Trump campaign used in terms of data mining to learn about various voters in various states and who they were and how to appeal to ’em.
I remember a NY TIMES article regarding praises on the Obama administration using the same data collection techniques – June 2013 New York Times story praising Obama and praising the geniuses on Obama’s tech team for being able to figure out how to data mine from Google and Facebook to advance Obama’s agenda.
So the very same thing that the media is trying to make you think is criminal activity, they were praising Obama to the hilt in countless newspaper stories all during 2013, and Google search reveals about 15 of ’em. And it is amazing how much praise there was in just the New York Times. And of course in the New York Times it gets picked up and run elsewhere.
Remember two things. Cambridge analytics equals the Mercers, and the Mercers equal Satan, as far as the Democrats and the media are concerned. The Mercers and the Koch brothers are wealthy conservatives who fund right-wing causes and candidates. And, as such, they are illegitimate, they’re racist, they’re sexist, they’re bigoted, they’re homophobes and dangerous. They are suspects.
And yet it’s this Neanderthal Trump who sneaks in and is able to undermine all these brilliant, Harvard educated, smart as whip technological wizards and not leave any evidence. Donald Trump was able to outwit Zuckerberg. Donald Trump and his buddies were able to go in there and make use of Facebook data even better and even more comprehensively than the guy who created it, Mark Zuckerberg, who himself may be running for president on the Democrat side.
Google leads the league in it, and they’re in bed with the Democrats and always have been. Facebook is number two. They’re in bed with the Democrats.
There’s nothing new here. Cambridge analytics didn’t do anything illegal. Facebook is not a victim; they are a participant. Facebook was not hacked. They were simply used, and they knew this was going on. They knew this two years ago. They knew the kinds of things Cambridge analytics was doing. It’s nothing new. It’s just the modern version of how political consults and parties use the phones to get out the vote, to stomp around neighborhoods and plant signs in front yards.
So here’s Trump, doesn’t know which way is up, he’s an idiot, he’s an embarrassment, but look at what he did. He literally stole a presidential election, and he did it with his buddies the Russians, and there isn’t a shred of evidence. And then this Neanderthal actually knew how better to exploit high-tech data collection, the internet and Facebook than Crooked Hillary or Obama were able to do. And not leave a shred of evidence, not a single fingerprint. What a bumbling idiot.
And all this time there’s no mention of the fact that Google had a satellite office in the White House. Google, the kings of data collection, Google, the kings of harvesting everybody’s personal data to use in advertising and who knows whatever else, practically had a White House relationship with Barack Hussein O, and nobody has a problem with that.
Facebook and Barack Obama, Google and Barack Obama, Facebook and Google and Hillary Clinton and the entire the Democrat Party was a purposeful strategic alignment to promote the perpetual power of the Democrat Party and the American left and using social media to promulgate fake news, to lie about conservative and Republican opponents and groups.
The fact that Cambridge Analytica, a company associated with the Mercer family that had worked with Trump coming in and literally hijacking what the left has thought was an exclusive province has just angered and enraged them, and they are livid at Zuckerberg for having let it happen
So your average, ordinary low-information voter thinks social media is out of control, that everybody’s hacking it, their data isn’t safe, they have no idea what’s really happened here. But there wasn’t any hacking. Facebook willingly provided avenues to all of their user data if you paid the price, which Cambridge Analytica did.
This little Zuckerberg did everything the left asked him to do! He turned over his whole database to the Obama campaign. He did everything to get Hillary elected!
This doesn’t help his election dreams – unless short term memories abound
MAGA!
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jscheidell,
I have a somewhat different take than you. The Mercers and the Koch brothers and Steve Bannon are Satanic, and Trump was their puppet. He is in way over his head, and he may be brought down not for his crimes against our democracy, but for his multiple payoffs to porn stars, Playboy models, and many other women, who will get him into court and depose for his utter lack of morality, his contempt for women, his betrayal of his wife, and his stupidity.
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Diane,
I guess Kennedy should have been brought down, because as you believe his utter lack of morality, his contempt for women, his betrayal of his wife, and his stupidity?
I bet Soros doesn’t make your Satanic list.
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Kennedy was a womanizer, for sure. But unlike Trump, he was highly intelligent, witty, charming. He was well educated. He read widely and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book. He was knowledgeable about foreign and domestic issues.
In contrast, Trump is an ignorant bully and braggart who came to the presidency with no knowledge of anything but gambling, wrestling, and his sexual appetites. He was well known in NYC as a man who didn’t pay his debts, who was not credit-worthy, who loved to chase skirts. Trump has no religious values, no moral qualms, the only deal he has ever made is a deal with the devil. He is busily engaged in destroying the federal government, the First Amendment, and our democratic norms and institutions. His appointments have uniformly mirrored his complete ignorance of the federal role in every area. He got a college degree but he gives no evidence of knowing how to read. He takes his daily top-secret briefings orally, perhaps because he is unable to read.
Historians have ranked him the worst president in American history after only one year in Office.
He is a daily disgrace to our nation in the world community. Everyone who serves in this administration will leave with their reputation in tatters.
Ask me again so I can go on another rant about my total contempt for this stupid man. The only amusing aspect to this sordid presidency is Trump’s hatred for Comey, whose last-minute intervention elected Trump.
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He certainly has the data to manipulate us.
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