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Latest WikiLeaks Reveal Suggests Facebook Is Too Close For Comfort With Clinton (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: As we quickly approach the November 8th elections, email leaks from the Clinton camp continue to loom over the presidential candidate. The latest data dump from WikiLeaks shines a light on emails between Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta and Facebook Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg. In one email exchange, dated June 6th, 2015, Sandberg expresses her desire for Clinton to become president, writing to Podesta, "And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can." While that was a private exchange, Sandberg also made her zest for seeing Clinton as the 45th President of the United States publicly known in a Facebook post on July 28th of this year. None of that is too shocking when you think about it. Sandberg has every right to endorse whichever candidate she wants for president. However, a later exchange between Sandberg and Podesta showed that Mark Zuckerberg was looking to get in on the action a bit, and perhaps curry favor with Podesta and the Clinton camp in shaping public policy. Donald Trump has long claimed that Clinton is too cozy with big businesses, and one cannot dismiss the fact that Facebook has a global user base of 1.7 billion users. When you toss in the fact that Facebook came under fire earlier this year for allegedly suppressing conservative news outlets in the Trending News bar, questions begin to arise about Facebook's impartiality in the political race. The report also notes that Sandberg is at the top of the list when it comes to picks for Treasury Secretary, if Clinton wins the election. In an interview with Politico, David Segal, executive director for Demand Progress, said "[Sandberg] is a proxy for this growing problem that is the hegemony of five to ten major Silicon Valley platforms." Lina Khan, a fellow with the Open Markets Program at the New American think tank adds: "If a senior Cabinet member is from Facebook, at worst it could directly interfere [in antitrust actions]. But even in the best of cases there's a real worry that it will have a chilling effect on good-faith antitrust efforts to scrutinize potential anti-competitive implications of dominant tech platforms."
It gives the serfs the illusion that they have some say in who their rulers are.
Who says companies can't favor one candidate or party over the other. Fox News clearly favors republicans and that just seems to be accepted.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
This illustrates the problem of virtual public spaces and real danger to freedom of speech and association that comes with digitization of all means of communications. Currently, FB and Twitter are free to censor political speech and push political agenda. You could argue that in 2016 as a politician you are effectively censored if you don't have access to FB and Twitter. This shouldn't be the case, insofar politics these should be considered virtual public spaces and any censorship of this kind should be disallowed.
There's no point in denying this any more. Journalists have always tended to lean left more than right, but 2016 has shown that all pretense of integrity and independence has completely evaporated. Rigged polls, collusion with PACs and the DNC, mudslinging directed at the RNC candidates while ignoring third party options and DNC scandals of the same magnitude as Watergate, and making unsubstantiated accusations of foreign interference by Russia while ignoring the foreign money from Soros and extreme Islamic regimes influencing the electoral process. Nothing is off limits to the same group that doctors audio recordings to falsely show racism and hypes up stories of a few cops committing criminal acts against black people while ignoring the fact that black on black violence is at epidemic levels.
Rigging the Facebook feed to promote pro-DNC pro-Clinton pro-SJW causes is IMO an effective subliminal ploy even for those that scroll past it so they can see funny pictures of their friends' kids. They're cutting off Twitter feeds and FB pages of people they don't like too even though they have not violated the user agreement. All of them will stop at nothing to brainwash and browbeat us into one mind, and use the SJWs to persecute those who disagree with the positions like useful idiots.
But it isn't just here as we've also seen in Europe with the hiding of stories and statistics on the effects on violence and crime due to mass migration from the third world. And, at this point, anyone who is a blind follower of political parties or of the media is a fool ready to be controlled to the will of an elite willing to throw us back into an effectively feudal system.
Welcome to the Ministry of Truth. We have always been at war. All dissent is doubleplusungood. You don't even need to imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever because it's already coming through your computer screen.
I don't think even the lowliest serf is ignorant anymore that every media outlet and talking head is campaigning for Hillary.
I wonder, though, if this won't backfire. People don't like being lied to, deceived, having information kept from them, or being talked down to like the media is doing. The average voter might lean right or left, but they want the process to be fair, and the media to be fair, and for the ballots to fall where they may.
This growing perception that the media will never relay the truth about Hillary or honestly investigate her scandals, that all the corporate interests (including Google and Facebook now) are manipulating public opinion for her - people aren't going to like this nonsense. I wonder if it won't cost her more votes than it nets her.
I can see the left and right coming together on this. The right hates Clinton, and so does much of the left. Both are sick and tired of her lies, manipulation and the dirty tricks political machine. I would never vote to put Clinton the Second back into the White House again, but for me it is even more about her coziness with Wall Street and her penchant for wars of regime change (e.g., Libya) and her pro-trade deal and drill-baby-drill stances than it is about her lies and deceitfulness.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I am voting third party, even though I have always voted Republican in the presidential election.
I wish people would revolt. Everyone likes to pretend that we wouldn't vote for the worst person in the world just because they bear our favored party's lablel. Well, this time around both sides get to prove it. To prove that honest government is more important than my desire for my side to dominate.
If not now, when?
Magazine of the John Birch Society. Yep, I need to hear from them.
Ah, the argumentum ad hominem! Always strange to see a logical fallacy modded up...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The problem with revolting is that, what ever comes after, there is no guarantee that it will be better. More often than not it is worse.
The distinction is pretty academic: when government becomes too powerful, media, police, politics, etc. all blur into one entity.
"The" massive corporations don't have much of a choice than to participate in this, because if they don't, their competitors will kill them via legal and legislative manipulation.
Ultimately, the failure is always a failure to limit government power. Governmental power will always be abused, and the only way to limit that abuse is to limit how much power you give government.
Governmental power will always be abused, and the only way to limit that abuse is to limit how much power you give government.
We used to have this document that listed the limited powers of the federal government and strictly forbade it from doing most everything else but nobody pays attention to that thing anymore.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Right. So let's take a look at how this "excerpt the gotcha" plays into that.
Slashdot writes about Zuckerberg:
Except that the email from Shelly about Zuckerberg very clearly begins:
Likewise on the other email from Cheryl. They mention the "She came over and was magical with my kids" re. Clinton. They don't bother mentioning the reason for Hillary's visit, which can be seen in what she's replying to:
This wasn't some buddy-buddy campaign visit, this was a "person I know's husband just died" visit. Likewise, the implication that they're supposed to give here is that they know her because of Facebook. No bothering to mention that the reason that they actually know her is because she was Larry Summers' Chief of Staff during the Clinton administration.
Almost anything can be made to look sinister when you take it completely out of context. Which is the whole purpose of these emails.
Furthermore, do you honestly think you couldn't do the exact same thing by picking through the Trump campaign's internal messaging? Do you have any clue how many people of note a major campaign interacts with, how many people work for them, etc? We know given Trumps record on server security that hacking him would have been a breeze, but miraculously nobody bothered. Why do you think that is?
Lastly: take everything you read with a grain of salt. I know everyone's reaction to statements that emails could have been altered (and scattered amongst real ones) is going to be "You just don't want to discuss them!" No, the reason you should take things with a grain of salt is that the other anti-Clinton hacks this year have done exactly that. Leaks posted by the hackers in different places involved cases where they had involved changing the same file to say different things (such as a donation list where they added a donation from Soros to a Russian democracy activist, but had different values for the donation in different versions of their release), cases where files were dated to after the hack occurred, and cases where file metadata showed the changes they'd been making. Salting real data with fake is something that they've been doing this year, so it'd be naive to think that they're just going to stop doing it now. Come on, even the most die-hard Clinton hater is going to be hard pressed to actually believe that the Clinton Foundation has a directory sitting around literally called "Pay for Play".
Yes, the majority will be real. But don't be naive when viewing them and assume that you can just take everything at face value.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."