And that is still an opinion, the reality is that your sorry sources of information are the ones that are stupidly hung up about “the science is not settled” so we should ignore it… not!
-Gavin A. Schmidt, climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Perhaps, and unfortunately if so, true. Regardless, if you believe it is “not settled science as to our role”, the last thing you should want to do is make that very question itself a political one. Yet by stifling research and repudiating scientific conclusions, Trump and the Republicans have done just that.
…unfortunately My Zuckerberg, I have exceeded my time. So for the time that I have remaining I would like to address this particular point.
You claim that it is incredibly easy to avoid all of the propaganda, all of the lies, all of the falsehoods. I think that it is incredibly easy for **you **to avoid propaganda. You come from a life of privilege. A white man living in a country that was founded on white supremacy. You have a net worth of 69 billion dollars. Can you avoid propaganda? Can you recognize what is a lie, or what is a falsehood? I have no doubt that you can. I have no doubt that whatever happens at the next election, you are going to be just fine.
You point to free speech, to the constitution, that this will protect the American people from obvious lies and propaganda. But this is nothing more than white American Exceptionalism. The constitution was drafted centuries ago by a group of long-dead-white-men and it served their purposes well. We live in a nation that stands by the principles and practically worships the “founding fathers” while it does everything it can to keep power away from indigenous peoples and the marginalised. We are witnessing what happens when an international crime consortium takes over the executive branch of government. We are discovering exactly how fragile this democracy actually is. The constitution was never representative of the will of the people. The constitution will protect people like you. It was drafted by people like you to protect people like you. “Free speech” will protect people like you. But I don’t look like you. My skin colour is different. Free speech didn’t stop the bombs being dropped on Tulsa in 1921. It didn’t stop the destruction of black wall street and its literal white-washing from history.
So for you to stand in front of me, and to have the gall to make the claim that it is “easy to avoid propaganda” tells me a single thing: that you don’t understand what propaganda actually is. Propaganda is designed to be consumed. Its designed to be propagated, to be appealing, its designed to be palatable. People targeted by propaganda have no incentive to “shut off their accounts.” They are consuming a diet of sweet-sugary-sweets that taste really good. What incentive would they have to stop? You seem to be missing the entire point of this debate.
You are gatekeepers. You decide, either through an algorithm or at the whim of the advertiser, what information is seen by certain people and what is gated off from others. You are gatekeepers for what is acceptable political speech on your platform. You are gatekeepers for what people see on your platform. This is the fundamental truth.
You said earlier on during the committee that you make very little money from political advertising. That money was not the issue. Yet you’ve just said to me now that you “make our decisions based on what we believe to be in the best financial interests of the company.” I find it hard to reconcile these two positions.
If it isn’t about the money, if we believe what you told the hearing earlier today that this is a decision motivated by a desire for “discourse” and not about “the best financial interests in the company”, then I want you to address this. You concede that for the purposes of this hearing that “propaganda is at least as appropriate a term to use as discourse.” So does Facebook welcome propaganda as much as it welcomes discourse?
I also would like to have it on the record that I have **not **called for regulation. I have **not **called for a change in laws. Facebook is a business that right now could decide to not take money for political advertising. Change your policies. Stop being a vector for state propaganda. You claim you don’t do it for the money.
So how about it Mr Zuckerberg? It won’t hurt the discourse. Your platform is still open for people to express their political opinions to anyone that is willing to listen. The only difference is that people will have to seek out that messaging instead of being micro-targeted using extremely complex algorithms by firms financed by billionaires.
The decision to allow lying in political advertising was done with the stroke of a pen. The decision to simply stop taking political advertisements could be done equally as quickly. Mr Zuckerberg: you have agency here.
But Mr Zuckerberg, if you don’t want to listen to us, then I implore you to listen to the people that should matter to you the most, your very own employees. Hundreds of them spoke up today in an open letter addressed to you. I will quote the pertinent parts:
These are your people Mr Zuckerberg. Your people are concerned for the integrity of your platform, they are concerned about the integrity of the next elections. And they certainly seem to have a better grasp on the issues than what you have demonstrated here today. Ignore them at your own peril.
Oh?
Oh.
Zuckerderp only cares about money. Truth? First Amendment? Honesty?
He doesn’t give a fuck about any of that.
She’d kick his ass and send him crying to his momma.
What’s that expression the tighty righties like so much?
Oh here it is …
FUCK YOUR FEELINGS!
I think that captures what I think about their feelz.
But that is the TRUTH.
…from today:
It appears obvious that Jack read my post and has decided to do the right thing. 
Its over to you now Mr Zuckerberg.
My concern is that at some point in the near future he will not just care about money. That he will realizing that he already has more money than he could ever use, and that instead of money he’ll start caring about power.
So, no paid political advertising from anyone anywhere on anything?
Which I suppose beats trying to satisfy all sides and subfactions about what is or is not to be judged proper.
And still does not prevent unpaid misinformation from being spread by both malicious and misguided individuals, publishing organizations, “influencers”, socks, trolls, and gullible in-laws.
…yep.
But that really isn’t the point. The point is spelled out clearly in Dorsey’s post. He has hit the nail on the proverbial head. Even if they did “edit for factual content” the microtargeting of communities vulnerable to propagandawould still be allowed to happen.
Of course not. But there is a substantial difference between organic reach and paid reach. I’ll quote what Dorsey said again:
A gullible in-law yelling from his Twitter pedestal about the latest Qanon conspiracy theory won’t get heard by more than the people that follow them and that share their posts. Paid reach changes that equation completely.
Its a very responsible position for Dorsey and Twitter to take. (And one that I honestly didn’t think he had in him.) He neatly sidesteps any push for regulation or changes to the law. Its an ethical stance that doesn’t explicitly give advantage to either side in the debate. One can only hope that Facebook follows their lead. People still have their “freedom of speech” on that platform. They just have to compete to be heard just like everyone else.
This is one of the least intelligible grammatically correct sentences I’ve ever seen. I think that warrants some kind of prize.
Comma #2 was good — omit it and both the others need to go too. Comma #1 was optional. It was comma #3 — the missing one — that was mandatory.
Unless Zuckerberg was Mason’s co-star in a brand-new (“yesterday”) movie. In that case, the sentence makes sense.
I don’t recall the source but I saw mention that FB’s political-ad revenue is only a tiny percentage of their take, raising the question: If it ain’t for the money, why is Zuck so adamant here? Because he LIKES propaganda, right?
Maybe it’s the same thing as Trump cashng a check for a few cents. Cents is cents.
She used logic on him.
Always a winning play.
Zuck, as we all know, just wanted to write some code that’d make it easier for him and his testosterone-drenched buddies to rate girls in the dorms and facilitate hook-ups.
And now look at him.
He seems to have a lot of trouble with English for some reason.
I believe Zuck claims it’s 0.5%, or 1/200th, of revenue.
But 1/200th of billions is still a shit-ton of cash.
But surely Zuckerberg’s position is not based on financial considerations, at least in this instance. In this recent thread I learned that there is no real financial or civil risk to Zuckerberg from banning political ads. The 0.5% of its revenue that FB gets from political ads only confirms it.
So although I think he is misguided, his fealty to ‘free speech’ is what’s really driving him.