“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.
The Guardian: “Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.”
“The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.”
New York Times: “Much of the activity, the company said, was in key battleground states like Texas, Florida and Georgia. Snapchat, which is popular among teenagers and young adults, pushed people 18 and over to register by adding a button about doing so on each user’s profile page. The company also sent video messages to all of those users urging them to register. The users were directed to a nonpartisan voter registration website, TurboVote.org.”
New York Times: “Each morning, Jamal Khashoggi would check his phone to discover what fresh hell had been unleashed while he was sleeping. He would see the work of an army of Twitter trolls, ordered to attack him and other influential Saudis who had criticized the kingdom’s leaders. He sometimes took the attacks personally, so friends made a point of calling frequently to check on his mental state.”
“Mr. Khashoggi’s online attackers were part of a broad effort dictated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his close advisers to silence critics both inside Saudi Arabia and abroad. Hundreds of people work at a so-called troll farm in Riyadh to smother the voices of dissidents like Mr. Khashoggi. The vigorous push also appears to include the grooming — not previously reported — of a Saudi employee at Twitter whom Western intelligence officials suspected of spying on user accounts to help the Saudi leadership.”
Twitter announced that it has permanently banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Infowars from its social media platform, CNBC reports.
The ban comes weeks after Jones was banned or suspended by other major tech companies like Apple, Facebook and YouTube.
A new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 67% of Republicans “believe the results of internet searches are skewed to the left — a shift that’s driving significant public distrust in search engines.”
“The survey shows that tech companies will have a hard time convincing the public that their algorithms aren’t built to favor any point of view, regardless of the reality. The distrust is driven largely by the right, but a significant minority of independents believe the results are biased toward the left, too.”
A new Media Research Center/McLaughlin & Associates poll finds that 65% of “self-described conservatives” believe that social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are purposely censoring conservatives and conservative ideas from their sites.
Greg Sargent notes that Twitter is having fun with President Trump’s latest conspiracy theory: Google is rigging its results when you search for “Trump news.”
“But while this might seem like typical Trumpian buffoonery, at its core is some deadly serious business. These attacks on the media — which are now spreading to extensive conspiracy-mongering about social media’s role in spreading information — form one part of an interlocking, two-piece Trumpian strategy (whether by instinct or design is unclear) that serves to underscore the urgency of this fall’s elections.”
“Trump is unleashing endless lies and attacks directed at the mechanisms of accountability that actually are functioning right now — the media, law enforcement and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — to persuade his supporters not only that they shouldn’t believe anything they hear from these sources, but also to energize them and get them to vote, to protect him from those institutions’ alleged conspiracy against him.”
President Trump “went after technology firms Tuesday morning, singling out Google by alleging its search setting are biased against him,” Roll Call reports.
“He used a pair of morning tweets to, as he often does, paint himself and fellow conservatives as the victims of a liberal conspiracy. In this incarnation of what is a running Trump narrative, he used this search topic to make his point: ‘Trump News.’”
“The president wrote Google’s search is programmed to return ‘only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media.’ That means, in his view, the tech giant has its search function ‘RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.’”
The Verge notes Trump added that Google and others were “hiding information and news that is good,” and said that this was “very serious situation” that “will be addressed.”
President Trump accused social media companies of silencing “millions of people” in an act of censorship, but without offering evidence to support his claim, Reuters reports.
He tweeted: “Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!”
“Facebook said it had identified a new political influence campaign on its platform that appeared intended to disrupt the midterm elections, with the social network finding and taking down 652 fake accounts and pages that were trying to sow discord around social issues,” the New York Times reports.
“Some of the accounts in the new influence campaign originated in Iran and Russia.”
Washington Post: “A group affiliated with the Russian government created phony versions of six websites — including some related to public policy and to the U.S. Senate — with the apparent goal of hacking into the computers of people who were tricked into visiting, according to Microsoft, which said Monday night that it discovered and disabled the fake sites.”
“The effort by the notorious APT28 hacking group, which has been publicly linked to a Russian intelligence agency and actively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, underscores the aggressive role Russian operatives are playing ahead of the midterm congressional elections in the United States.”
Former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn told Bloomberg that social media companies like Facebook are a larger societal danger than were banks before the financial crisis, due to their dissemination of misinformation.
Said Cohn: “In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today.”
He added: “And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull.”
“The Democratic National Committee warned party candidates running in November elections not to use devices made by Chinese telecommunications companies ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies because they pose a security risk,” Reuters reports.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) “sent a letter to the chairman of a powerful House committee to ask that he publicly grill Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey over recent allegations that the platform limits the reach of some conservative accounts,” Axios reports.
Facebook announced “that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity ahead of November’s midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.
“It has been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved.”
Facebook put out a statement explaining what they found.
“Twitter and Facebook are scrambling to assuage conservative leaders who have sounded alarms — and sought to rile voters — with accusations that the country’s tech giants are censoring right-leaning posts, tweets and news,” the Washington Post reports.
“From secret dinners with conservative media elite to private meetings with the Republican National Committee, the new outreach reflects tech giants’ delicate task: satisfying a party in power while defending online platforms against attacks that threaten to undermine the public’s trust in the Web.”
Washington Post: “The meeting with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security took place at Facebook’s headquarters last month and was also attended by Google, Apple, Microsoft and others… It was an attempt at dialogue and information-sharing that was absent during the 2016 presidential elections.”
“The nation’s top intelligence chiefs declared in February that the Kremlin is continuing its effort to disrupt the U.S. political system and to target the midterm elections. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said at the time that operatives plan to use propaganda, false personas, and bots to undermine the upcoming election.”
New York Times: “The meeting, which was initiated by Facebook, was seen as a hopeful first step to ensure that the midterms were not a repeat of the Russian interference in 2016, said the three people who attended the meeting.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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