Slashdot Mirror
Zuckerberg Grilled At Angry Facebook Shareholder's Meeting (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News' report on Facebook's annual shareholder's meeting:
On Thursday in Menlo Park, one investor compared the social network's poor stewardship of user data to a human rights violation. Another warned that scandal is not good for Facebook's bottom line. And one advised Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to emulate George Washington, not Vladimir Putin, and avoid turning Facebook into a "corporate dictatorship." Facebook struggled to keep order, kicking one woman out of the meeting within the first few minutes for repeated interruptions. A plane zipped overhead pulling a banner that read "YOU BROKE DEMOCRACY" and advertising Freedom From Facebook, a group of privacy and anti-monopoly activists that are pressing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to break up the company...
Zuckerberg repeated the same reassurances he used in front of U.S. and European lawmakers earlier this year: The company hasn't taken a broad enough view of its responsibility... "We're also very focused on being more transparent," Zuckerberg said, touting the fact that the company had just posted its policies on content moderation for the first time. Minutes earlier, the company announced that shareholder proposals for more transparency and oversight had failed, surprising no one. Zuckerberg controls the company through special stock that gives him more votes than other shareholders.
"Facebook said that just because the proposals were blocked, that didn't mean the company doesn't care about these issues."
Zuckerberg repeated the same reassurances he used in front of U.S. and European lawmakers earlier this year: The company hasn't taken a broad enough view of its responsibility... "We're also very focused on being more transparent," Zuckerberg said, touting the fact that the company had just posted its policies on content moderation for the first time. Minutes earlier, the company announced that shareholder proposals for more transparency and oversight had failed, surprising no one. Zuckerberg controls the company through special stock that gives him more votes than other shareholders.
"Facebook said that just because the proposals were blocked, that didn't mean the company doesn't care about these issues."
Micro-targeting of voters was used by Obama against Hillary.
But when Trump does it, suddenly Facebook has overstepped.
The problem is Facebook's shitty policies which allowed a researcher to obtain details of people who hadn't agreed to give them and the amount of people's whose details were gathered. Who used them is not the issue.
In Obama's case an app was made and people OPTED INTO giving it their personal data. In Cambridge's case the data was taken without CONSENT.
See the difference and the line that was crossed? I capitalized them so it's easier for you to pick out from inside the blurry Fox bubble.
The solution is surely to restrict political advertising during elections. Other countries do this already.
We should certainly ban political advertising by foreigners near an election, just as we already ban campaign contributions from foreigners. Sadly, its the same politicians who enforce that ban, so it's not exactly strict.
But when it comes to Americans running political ads during elections, that's exactly what is meant by "freedom of the press". And freedom of the press should not be limited to the likes of Bezos, who can buy the Washington Post to get his opinion out there. Us peons who can only buy an ad, not the whole paper, also deserve freedom to express political dissent during an election.
Also, where's the line between an ad an an op-ed? Between an op-ed and selective reporting? If you follow through on your proposal, you're saying that CNN can run 24/7 anti-Trump coverage near an election, and in fact can't mention Trump negatively (or positively, as if) near the election at all. That's sort of the opposite of freedom of the press.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But when it comes to Americans running political ads during elections, that's exactly what is meant by "freedom of the press".
Um, no. Freedom of the press was all about the government not being able to suppress editorial content, not regulation of paid content.
The baffling supreme court decision that the first amendment should be interpreted to classify money as speech wasn't from 1796, but 1976.
This, along with the "corporate personhood" doctrine, has subverted the constitution and amendments from what was the obvious intent to something completely different, eroding the safeties of the individual from abuse of power that the founding fathers clearly had in mind.
No it wasn't what people agreed to. Facebook's first response was that Cambridge violated the terms of use of said data access. Facebook did a piss poor job of enforcing data protection but that doesn't make this a "business as it was designed" situation.
The press is free to refuse to publish. You have no right to buy ads.
Write your own pamphlets, run your own private press - that is explicitly protected.
You're making a new argument, unrelated to the previous topic of the thread. The point was the government must not prevent you from buying political ads. And the broadcast media (OTA TV and radio) does not have the right to refuse to publish, because the airwaves are regulated by that same government. Heck, I remember DJs in Florida apologizing for political ads during the 2000 election, explaining this very thing - people would call in and yell at the station for the (woefully mistargeted) political ads they were running, but they had no choice.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, you're technically correct in a very narrow sense, which, I'm told, is the best kind of correct. You'd have a rough time convincing any humans that EULAs are informed consent, however, especially unpublicized opt-out data collection and third-party sharing. Besides that, no one consented to a shadow profile, or to the collection and sale of info from data brokers to facebook. This argument just doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny.