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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."

4 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. The New American: by fredrated · · Score: 0, Troll

    Magazine of the John Birch Society. Yep, I need to hear from them.

  2. You broke it, you bought it by PopeRatzo · · Score: 0, Troll

    It's been part of the "conservative" orthodoxy for decades that corporations have First Amendment rights and money = speech. Remember, "Corporations are people, my friend"? It's unseemly for them to want to cry now because Democrats have done better under those rules.

    I don't remember hearing anything from them when a top Trump donor (or Trump's son-in-law) used their newspaper to push pro-Trump stories, or when the Koch Brothers (and ALEC more broadly) were influencing elections from the national level down to local school boards.

    Anytime they want to overturn Citizens United or pass a constitutional amendment asserting that only natural humans have guaranteed civil rights, I'll be glad to start taking them seriously.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  3. Re:MSM and social media are in the bag for the DNC by PvtVoid · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.
     

    I'm guessing lead poisoning.

  4. Re: So says every SJW attacking Peter Thiel by orgelspieler · · Score: 1, Troll

    Yes, really. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I can tell you that you don't always have the presence of mind to complain right away. You may fear retribution or violence. You may be in a no-win situation with somebody with more power/authority than you. Besides, it can be quite shocking when somebody does something horrifying out of the blue. If Trump brags about grabbing people's genitals, and that they let him do it, does not mean that they wanted him to do it or allowed it. I'm not a "only yes means yes" type of guy, but I know that "not yes" sometimes means "no." To pretend otherwise is to tacitly approve of blaming the victim (which by the way is a tradition that dates back to the Old Testament).