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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."
All the media companies online and off-line, Paul Ryan and his Republican insiders, The DNC, all foreign governments except Russia and China. Women, Blacks, Mexicans, disabled people, ex soldiers, they're all plotting against Trump. Jeb Bush, big plotter, Ted Cruz and his sleazy push polls,Fox News and its clown announcers, CNN and their boring anti-trump panelists, Charles Koch and his puppets, MSBNC crazy crazy fraudsters, Marco De Rubio the joke phoney light weight, John Kasich the Absentee Governor who supports Mexico..... ALL PLOTTING!
It's time for the non-Democrat, non-Republican, white, male, full-fit, but not military, who are not in the media, or online media, it's time for that MAJORITY to rise up and put Trump into power he so richly believes he deserves!
Make America Great Again!
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.
I don't disagree with you. Corporate agendas are not rare. However i do think there is a difference between being blatantly in support of a candidate (which from the view of a humble european, like me, is the case with Fox News) and having a slightly favourable selection algorythm that favours one candidate. I don't know enough about the laws and regulations of the US to judge, but what facebook does seems close to subliminal marketing which the FCC revokes broadcast licences for. Is it too big a stretch to compare news nudging to subliminal messaging? I doubt the consumer knows they are being manipulated.
I am being inundated with all sorts of pro-Trump posts by one of my friends. All the anti-Clinton conspiracy posts. Every damn one of them. Including one that was so bad that even Fox News published a retraction.
So as far as I can tell FB isn't shaping much, otherwise they would have tweaked that mysterious algorithm that only shows you posts from people that they want you to see and then for everything else goes "What post? I don't see any post? What do you mean you saw a post 5 minutes ago and now you can't find it in your feed? No idea what you are talking about."
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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?
Anybody that still has karma, I recommend that you do NOT make comments in this thread.
Here be dragons!
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
You must be going to the Church circular, because I have NEVER in all my years seen a Western election where the media has so clearly, relentlessly, and shamelessly picked a side and gone on the attack against a candidate.
People are fooling themselves. What is happening to Trump has never happened to any candidate anyone can remember. There have always been oafs, buffoons, and morons running for office. Regan, Dan Quale, George H.W fucking Bush people. Bush wasn't even that long ago; Sarah Palin if you want something closer.
But People are losing their minds over Trump. Really. He's nowhere near as far out there in comparison to a lot of Republican candidates of yesteryear, but the entire Media have flipped their shit like this is a second 9/11. I don't even think the coverage was this sloppy and slanted during the Iraq War. 90% of it is complete bullshit and hysteria, the other 10% is distorted reporting.
I've come to the conclusion that it's not Trump. He's not that extreme. It's about his policies. They are extreme. But they're also what the public wants. What Sanders' supporters wanted. What a lot of people fed up with 8 years of austerity and 25 years of decline want. And that's why the media is lashing out so aggressively against him. Because unlike all the other batshit Republicans and religious wingnuts, Trump is actually giving the public want they want: Revenge.
It's not about Trump. This is about the media trying to smother a rebellion by the 99%. And boy are they dirty about it.
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.
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..."
Except some of the polls showing Trump behind are from Fox News.
When Fox has a recent poll that shows Clinton is ahead by 6-7 points (depending on whether it's a 2-way poll or 4-way), well, I really doubt they're carrying water for Clinton.
And you have to understand... there's a certain percentage of the voting populace that is going to vote for the Republican candidate no matter who it is or how they are presented (good, bad, indifferent). There are likewise going to be a certain percentage of voters that are going to vote for the Democratic candidate no matter who it is or how they are presented (good, bad, indifferent).
It doesn't matter what scandals dog those candidates, they will always get a certain percentage of the electorate.
The trick is appealing to those who normally fall into one party or the other but don't care much for the candidate AND getting voters who class themselves as "independent".
Unless something causes an inordinate number of voters from one party or the other to stay home, it is generally impossible to win the Presidential election with just the voters that you can automatically count on. You have to attract voters from outside those blocks.
And Trump hasn't been doing so.
Sure, he's gotten a few. Can't argue that. But he's spent so much time actively insulting blocks of voters that he's effectively reversed the inroads that the Republican party started making among (for example) Hispanic voters after Romney's defeat in 2012. Not to mention African-American voters, some Jewish voters, some Asian voters....
He's trying (whether he means to or not) rely on the angry older white voter, and hey, he's gotten that block fairly well nailed down. But it's been at the expense of every other block of voters that he would need to win.
The "easiest" path for a Trump victory in two weeks is to carry every state that Romney won in 2012 and then flip enough states to make up the 64 electoral votes that Romney fell short of.
The problem there is that not only is Trump apparently failing to do that (it's unlikely that he's going to flip Pennsylvania or Florida, and Ohio might be out of reach as well), it's possible that he's going to lose some of the states that Romney won. He might lose Arizona, he might lose North Carolina. Hell, he might lose Utah.
Facebook and other social media don't need to do anything to make Trump look bad. They just need to give him a forum, and Trump will do that himself.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.