“The White House on Wednesday escalated its war against social media when it announced an unprecedented campaign asking Internet users to share stories of when they thought they were censored by Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Twitter, tapping into President Trump’s long-running claim that tech giants are biased against conservatives,” the Washington Post reports.
‘It’s Time to Break Up Facebook’
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes argues in the New York Times that the social media giant must be broken up.
“Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.”
“Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.”
“Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American. It is time to break up Facebook.”
Sanders Unveils New Organizing App
Sen. Bernie Sanders “flaunted his ground operation Saturday with what he called the ‘largest distributed day of action ever in a presidential campaign’ and announced a new online organizing tool called BERN,” NBC News reports.
“The app allows everyday supporters to contribute to the campaign’s voter database by logging names and background information of anyone from a family member to a stranger met at a bus stop. It matches each name to a voter record before noting their level of support, priority issue and even union membership.”
Why Twitter Won’t Ban White Supremacist Propaganda
Motherboard: “At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?”
“An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law… With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.”
“Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians… The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.”
Facebook Could Be Fined $5 Billion
Facebook said that it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations after an investigation found that its handling of data had harmed consumers, the New York Times reports.
The F.T.C. opened a new investigation last year after Facebook came under fire again for the improper handling of people’s data involving Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, as well as a major data breach.
Trump Complained to Twitter CEO About Lost Followers
President Trump met privately with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, “a huddle at the White House between one of the site’s most prolific users and an executive who’s faced criticism for the way Twitter has handled the president’s tweets,” the Washington Post reports.
“A significant portion of the meeting focused on Trump’s concerns that Twitter quietly, and deliberately, has limited or removed some of his followers… Trump said he had heard from fellow conservatives who had lost followers for unclear reasons as well.”
Bots Push ‘Russiagate Hoax’ After Mueller Report
“A network of more than 5,000 pro-Trump Twitter bots railed against the ‘Russiagate hoax’ shortly after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report last week, according to data gathered by a prominent disinformation researcher and analyzed by NBC News. The network illustrates the ongoing challenge Twitter faces in persistent efforts to manipulate its platform.”
“These bots, however, did not appear to come from Russia. Instead, the bots had ties to a social media operation that previously pushed messages backing the government of Saudi Arabia and were connected to a person who claimed to be a private social media consultant.”
WhatsApp Users Spreading Nazi Imagery In Germany
“German WhatsApp users are spreading far-right propaganda through the use of stickers and chain letters but the company is doing little to nothing to stop it, despite local laws forbidding the use of Nazi imagery,” BuzzFeed News reports.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Quits Facebook
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), “whose mastery of social media has helped drive the national conversation and shed light on the inner workings of congressional power, has given up on the most popular social network in the world,” the Washington Post reports.
The freshman lawmaker says she stopped using her Facebook account and was scaling back on all social media, which she described as a “public health risk” because it can lead to “increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, escapism.”
Zuckerberg Calls for New Rules for the Internet
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg backs new regulations for the Internet in a Washington Post op-ed.
“By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it—the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things—while also protecting society from broader harms.”
Zuckerberg added that he believes these updates can be broken down into four categories “harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”
Trump Hates Autonomous Cars
“In President Trump’s view, self-driving cars are a menace to society. A skeptic of cutting-edge technology — as his tweets about Boeing’s ‘complex’ planes emphasized — Trump has privately said he thinks the autonomous vehicle revolution is ‘crazy’ and that he’d never let a computer drive him around,” Axios reports.
Said one source: “You know when he’s telling a story, and he does the hand motions. He says, ‘Can you imagine, you’re sitting in the back seat and all of a sudden this car is zig-zagging around the corner and you can’t stop the fucking thing?’”
Warren Proposes Breaking Up Big Tech Companies
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “who is bidding to be the policy pacesetter in the Democratic presidential primary, is set to announce another expansive idea on Friday: a regulatory plan aimed at breaking up some of America’s largest tech companies, including Amazon, Google and Facebook,” the New York Times reports.
“The proposal — which comes on the same day Ms. Warren will hold a rally in Long Island City, the Queens neighborhood that was to be home to a major new Amazon campus — calls for the appointment of regulators who would ‘unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition,’ as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace.”
Trump Campaign Takes Position Opposite of White House
Jonathan Swan: “The Trump re-election campaign sparked widespread confusion inside the Trump administration and the cellular wireless industry on Friday night when it advocated for a nationwide ‘wholesale’ 5G network, which was 180 degrees from official White House policy.”
“The result? Mass uncertainty. Administration officials who work on 5G freaked out. And industry leaders were perplexed.”
“It’s highly unusual — if not unprecedented — for a presidential campaign to advocate for a different position from the sitting president’s administration.”
RNC Chair Says Government Did Not Create the Internet
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel framed the differences between the two political parties as capitalism vs. socialism during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Said McDaniel: “It’s going to be a choice. Are we going to want capitalism? Look at all the great achievements of our country: flight, cars, the Internet. Sorry, Al Gore. The Internet. None of that came from government. It came from innovation. It came from the greatness of America.”
Philip Bump: “So here’s the thing. The Internet very much did come from government, quite literally.”
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Court Rules Politician Cannot Block Social Media Foes
Reuters: “A federal appeals court said on Monday a Virginia politician violated the Constitution by temporarily blocking a critic from her Facebook page, a decision that could affect President Trump’s appeal from a similar ruling in New York.”
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Extra Bonus Quote of the Day
“If you Google the word ‘idiot’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?”
— Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), quoted by the Washington Post, in a question to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai.
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