Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook Has Ruined Human Social Interaction And Now Zuckerberg’s ‘Metaverse’ Wants to Destroy Whatever’s Left, by Helen Buyniski

Posted on October 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Bet you can’t wait for cradle-to-grave Facebook. From Helen Buyniski at RT News via lewrockwell.com:

Having bulldozed most real-life relationships already, Mark Zuckerberg is now moving to strip away what’s left of our expectations of privacy by dragging us kicking and screaming into an online padded cell called the ‘metaverse’.

The emergence of all-too-perfect whistleblower Frances Haugen, backed by a bevy of PR valkyries declaring Facebook a profit-seeking hive of hate, might suggest to some that the social network’s goose is cooked. But while the government and censor-happy NGOs delusionally battle over how best to carve up Facebook’s carcass, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is busy leveling up, leaving the wreck of real-life social interaction behind while he crafts a new virtual holding pen for the millions daily glued to Facebook and Instagram.

Under fire politically for putting profits before users’ welfare – an attribute that describes every corporation in existence – Facebook’s m.o. has been clear since the platform’s early days. The platform exists to slurp up as much data as physically (and metaphysically) possible before the user realizes he’s being used and stops logging in. Now that there’s no longer any doubt about that in the public eye, Zuckerberg is free to go full Manifest Destiny, reaching into users’ minds in search of ever more data to pimp out.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Privacy, Surveillance, Tyranny

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The real story behind Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, by Kit Knightly

Posted on October 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

If the government regulates Facebook and the rest of the Internet do you think that will expand or contract allowable expression on the Internet? From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

The social media giant is in the crosshairs, and that might be bad news for the internet in general.

Facebook suffered a massive outage on Monday. At the same time a high profile “whistleblower” has come forward to dish the FB dirt. These two things have combined to create a perfect storm of narrative portraying Mark Zuckerberg’s company as a monster in desperate need of slaying by some deft government intervention.

But to what extent is that story contrived? Is Facebook willingly going along with it? And what does it mean for the rest of the internet?

What happened?

For several hours on Monday afternoon Facebook – and its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp – were completely offline. Rumours circulated that large portions of the social media giant had been totally deleted. Others suggested it was a cyber attack.

Facebook itself insists there was no attack, and that it was purely an engineering error, but of course no tech company would ever admit to being vulnerable to a hack.

There’s always the possibility the whole event was staged of course. Either way, the timing is very suspicious.

Why do you say that?

For weeks an anonymous “whistleblower” has been “leaking” documents to the Wall Street Journal allegedly showing Facebook is utilising highly unethical business practices.

The leaker of the so-called “Facebook Files” finally revealed her true identity as Frances Haugen, a data scientist, in an interview with 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

The massive Facebook outage then happened on Monday, with Ms Haugen’s scheduled testimony in front of Congress happening the following morning on Tuesday.

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White House Admits to Flagging Posts For Facebook, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on July 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

Let’s just call Facebook an agency of the government and be done with it. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

We have previously discussed the extensive censorship programs maintained by Big Tech, including companies like Twitter and Facebook taking sides in major controversies from gender identification to election fraud to Covid-19. The rise of corporate censors has combined with a heavily pro-Biden media to create the fear of a de facto state media that controls information due to a shared ideology rather than state coercion.  That concern has been magnified by demands from Democratic leaders for increased censorship, including censoring political speech, and now word that the Biden Administration has routinely been flagging material to be censored by Facebook.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the Biden administration is working with Facebook to flag “problematic” posts that “spread disinformation” on COVID-19. She explained that the Administration has created “aggressive” policing systems to spot “misinformation” to be “flagged” for the social media companies.

Obviously, anyone can object to postings. There is a greater danger when the government has a systemic process for aggressively flagging material to be censored. The real problem however is with the censorship system itself. We have seen how there needs to be little coordination between political figures and the media to maintain controlled narratives in public debates and discussions.

The concern is obvious that this allows for a direct role of the government in a massive censorship program run by private companies. There have been repeated examples of the censoring of stories that were embarrassing or problematic for the Biden Administration.  Even when Twitter expressed regret for the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election, there was an immediate push back for greater censorship from Democrats.

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To Avoid 1st Amendment Concerns, Biden Administration Announces They Will Let Facebook Run The Gulags

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

From The Babylon Bee:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After critics raised concerns regarding the constitutionality of the Biden administration’s planned gulags for anti-vaxxers and insurrectionists, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki announced they will now avoid any legal pitfalls by having Facebook run the camps instead.

“We are proud to announce that our gulags will be run by the beloved mega corporation Facebook!” said Psaki to reporters. “There are many problematic people in this country who desperately need re-education, and we can think of no one better to run the camps than the most powerful social media platform in history! Yay!”

Unfortunately, none of the reporters were still paying attention at that point, since they were happily munching on chocolate chip cookies.

Legal experts say that since Facebook is a private corporation, it can do whatever it wants, even if that means forcibly detaining American citizens in labor camps until they die of abuse and malnutrition.

“This is such a great idea,” said brilliant Conservative folk hero David French. “The government is not violating the 1st Amendment by outsourcing the gulags to Facebook since Facebook is a private entity—and their terms of service clearly state at the bottom of page 3,272 that they are allowed to detain you in a labor camp any time they want to. If you agreed to the terms of service, there’s really nothing you can do. I guess you should have used another monopolistic social media platform. This is a huge win for conservative free-speech principles.”

In a statement, Facebook said they remain committed to gently re-educating purveyors of vaccine and 2020 election misinformation until they have all the correct opinions on everything.

Conservative politicians said they will not take this lying down, and have promised to haul Mark Zuckerberg before a committee and yell at him a little bit.

https://babylonbee.com/news/to-avoid-1st-amendment-concerns-biden-administration-announces-they-will-let-facebook-run-the-gulags

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Biden Administration Completely Kills The “It’s A Private Company So It’s Not Censorship” Argument, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

When the government is telling a media company what it must delete from its platform the company can no longer be considered “private” in any meaningful sense of the word. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

In what’s surely the biggest “Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that” moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading “disinformation” about the Covid-19 response.

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the press on Thursday. “Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts with people, who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content. So, we’re helping get trusted content out there.”

Psaki told the White House press corps that the administration has a list of accounts who produce most of the anti-vaccine information on Facebook, which civil libertarians are decrying as an obviously authoritarian government overreach.

“The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as ‘problematic’ so that Facebook can remove them,” Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter in response to the news. “This is the union of corporate and state power — one of the classic hallmarks of fascism — that the people who spent five years babbling about fascism support.”

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Facebook To Provide Pop-Up Warning When Your Friends Begin Thinking For Themselves

Posted on July 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

From The Babylon Bee:

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How Facebook Turned Its Market Success Into A Culture War On America, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on June 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s a sad fact that throughout the history of American business, many of those who have been most successful have seen their next step as telling everyone else how to live. We’d be better off if they stayed in their vaults and counted their money, like Scrooge McDuck. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

In twenty-first-century America, millions of Americans—Christians and social conservatives especially—are finding that the nation’s most influential institutions appear to be implacably hostile toward them.

These institutions include universities, public schools, the news media, and government bureaucracies. Moreover, corporate America has increasingly embraced a posture of hostility toward groups considered to be “right wing” or conservative.

Recent examples are numerous, to say the least. Major League Baseball, for instance, recently moved its all-star game out of the state of Georgia with the explicit purpose of punishing voters and policymakers who supported policies MLB didn’t like. These “objectionable” policies were mostly supported by conservatives. Meanwhile, YouTube—owned by Google—bans content creators who express opinions Google’s employees and leaders disagree with. These opinions are usually ones we would consider to be “conservative” or at least “anti-Leftist.” Twitter and Facebook employ a similar bias when actively intervening to ban users and opinions deemed unacceptable by corporate personnel.

In other words, corporate power is being used to wage ideological battles far beyond the usual issues of minimizing the firm’s tax burden or avoiding regulatory compliance costs. Corporate America has chosen a side in the culture war.

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Could Facebook’s Diem Become FedCoin By Default? by Mark Jeftovic

Posted on May 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nobody would be surprised if Facebook was the corporate sponsor of a cryptocurrency that ushered in a cryptocurrency issued by the Federal reserve. Other than Google, there’s no Silicon Valley firm who’s more in bed with the government. From Mark Jeftovic at zerohedge.com:

Today’s post is an excerpt from the monthly edition of The Crypto Capitalist Letter. To learn more about TCC and receive a free copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, join the Bombthrower list here.

I had a reader ask me about Silvergate Capital. They’re a bank holding company with a lot of exposure to the crypto currency space. I hadn’t yet analyzed them deeply, but I did notice that they recently announced a partnership with Facebook on their DiemUSD stablecoin.

Diem is Facebook’s rebrand of Libra. Libra was a private crypto currency Facebook proposed to launch which in my mind was a transformative event for nation states and central banks. That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived and it posed an existential threat to the status quo.

They were able to hold off Facebook’s Libra, for awhile. They fought dirty. US Senators sent straight up extortion letters to members of Facebook’s Libra Consortium threatening to investigate them for ostensible ties to child pornography on Facebook’s platform if they went through with the project. They all dropped out.

My heart didn’t exactly bleed for Facebook, but the incident was instructive. I wrote about it at the time, but I will repeat the salient point here:

Should a gigantic platform like Facebook successfully launch their own digital currency, a person’s Facebook account will become more important in their day-to-day lives than their nation state issued passport. Especially if we’re entering an era of drastically curtailed travel for plebeians. The battle between the US, France, et al and Facebook over Libra was an early round in the struggle between waning Nation States and ascendent Network States.

Facebook kept working on their Libra, first under a wallet program called Novi and now as Diem, and Diem USD will be their stablecoin.  One can only surmise that behind the scenes something has shifted so that Facebook thinks they can proceed with launching a new stablecoin.

This partnership with Silvergate, as well as relocating their Diem Association, which oversees their digital currency projects, from Switzerland back to the United States may be part of that calculus.

There have been some rumblings that the US is losing the Central Bank Digital Currency race and that one way to jumpstart a program would be to partner with a private entity who is already further down the road with it.

Who would be uniquely situated to provide a solution in some manner of public-private partnership? Facebook, for one.

When we think about what Fedcoin could reasonably be expected to do, my guess is:

  • Provide the rails for UBI and other entitlement programs
  • Be fully programmable (an example is Australia’s cashless Centrelink card which will provide welfare benefits that cannot be spent on booze, cigarettes or gambling)
  • Be fully trackable: with everybody walking around with Facebook installed on their smartphone, it’s already baked-in.
  • Ubiquitous: There are more Facebook users in the USA (190 million) than had voted in the last election (161 million).

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BREAKING: Project Veritas releases internal Facebook documents detailing campaign to censor vaccine concerns on platform, by Mia Cathell

Posted on May 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s nice to get documentation of what we all know is going on: social media censoring stories, angles, and politics it doesn’t like. From Mia Cathell at thepostmillennial.com:

Project Veritas has obtained internal documents from Facebook whistleblowers detailing the social media platform’s efforts to censor COVID-19 vaccine concerns.

Two of the Facebook insiders have come forward with leaked company documents detailing the Big Tech giant’s plan to curb and police “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) worldwide through surreptitious “comment demotion.”

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” one of the Facebook insiders said to Project Veritas. “If I lose my job, it’s like, what do I do? But that’s less of a concern to me.”

The stated goal of the global feature is to “reduce user exposure” to VH comments. Another aim of the program is to “decrease” other engagement of VH comments including “create, likes, reports [and] replies,” according to Project Veritas.

One of the Facebook whistleblowers said the company uses a tier system to rank and determine how comments should be censored or buried. This is all based on how much the statements question or caution against the COVID-19 vaccination.

Tier 2, for instance, represents “Indirect Discouragement” of getting vaccinated. User comments such as these would be “suppressed,” Project Veritas reported.

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Re The Lefty Twit Called Zuck, by David Stockman

Posted on May 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

He looks like a twit, sounds like a twit, and acts like a twit. Mark Zuckerberg is assuredly a twit, and he can’t buy himself out of that. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner via lewrockwell.com:

We have no use for Donald Trump, but even less for the arrogant lefty twit, Mark Zuckerberg, who joined a conspiracy of Silicon Valley Robber Barons on January 6th to ban a then sitting president of the United States from their social media platforms.

Yes, we know they are private companies. So they can do anything they damn will please, including thanking the Donald for the $160 million of ads his campaign bought from Facebook in 2020 by kicking him off the platform.

But this isn’t really about free speech narrowly; it’s about the malign societal impact of free money from the Fed and the manner in which the vastly overvalued companies in the tech space have enabled the callow wokesters who run them to subordinate profit-maximization to left-wing virtue-signalling.

After all, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that YouTube, Twitter or Facebook were losing customers, revenue and profits owing to the Donald’s massive presence in social media. The Trump haters were always free to not follow or unfollow him, or to trash his posts if that’s what got their jollies off; and the Trump lovers in their tens of millions actually brought massive incremental traffic to these platforms, and therefore positive ad metrics, revenues and profits.

The abrupt, nearly simultaneous canceling of the Donald’s privileges by all three platforms on the afternoon of January 6th, therefore, is surely a trifecta of the dumbest business decisions of all time. And if it weren’t for the political correctness of the matter, it would make for a classic Harvard Business School case study (which won’t happen) on the corporate harm that results from elevating the extraneous divertissements of corporate executives over the dollars and cents of business advantage.

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