Mark Zuckerberg"s Long Litany Of Failings - Mainstream Media Turns On Social Media

The mainstream media is a fickle beast beholden to the direction of the prevailing political winds. Unfortunately for Facebook, Google and Twitter, those winds have turned about face in recent weeks as the political establishment thrashes about in its misguided efforts to prove that – aided by social media - Russia changed the course of the 2016 presidential election. While Facebook’s share price has suffered very little so far, the mainstream media is going to work on the reputations of Facebook and its billionaire founder. For example, according to Vanity Fair last month.

"…the tech giant is broadly focused on repairing its reputation following revelations that its platform was weaponized by Russia in the 2016 election."

“Weaponized” seemed a very strong word to use.

With the social media platform deemed “fair game” in the mainstream media, the Financial Times has lined up Mark Zuckerberg in its crosshairs. The FT journalist who penned the piece on Zuckerberg, Edward Luce, is cut from establishment cloth…and then some. Luce is the son of Richard Luce, now Baron Luce, the former MP, former Lord Chamberlain to the Queen and Knight of the Garter. Edward Luce read PPE at Oxford, took a sabbatical as a speech writer for Larry Summers and is the FT’s chief US commentator.

We are no fans of Zuckerberg and sympathise with some of it, but we recognise a hatchet job when we see it. In the article, Luce accuses Zuckerberg of...

Self-evident observation, or “stating the bleeding obvious”, to use the English vernacular:

Here is what Mark Zuckerberg learned from his 30-state tour of the US: polarisation is rife and the country is suffering from an opioid crisis. Forgive me if I have to lie down for a moment. Yet it would be facile to tease Mr Zuckerberg for his self-evident observations. Some people are geniuses at one thing and bad at others. Mr Zuckerberg is a digital superstar with poor human skills.

Political inadequacy and insincerity:

Facebook’s co-founder is not the first Silicon Valley figure to show signs of political inadequacy - nor will he be the last. But he may be the most influential. He personifies the myopia of America’s coastal elites: they wish to do well by doing good. When it comes to a choice, the “doing good” bit tends to be forgotten. There is nothing wrong with doing well, especially if you are changing the world. Innovators are rightly celebrated. But there is a problem with presenting your prime motive as philanthropic when it is not. Mr Zuckerberg is one of the most successful monetisers of our age. Yet he talks as though he were an Episcopalian pastor. “Protecting our community is more important than maximising our profits,” Mr Zuckerberg said this month after Facebook posted its first ever $10bn quarterly earnings result — an almost 50 per cent year-on-year jump.

Self-promotion, acting like a Soviet dictator and losing touch with ordinary people:

When a leader goes on a “listening tour” it means they are marketing something. In the case of Hillary Clinton, it was herself. In the case of Mr Zuckerberg, it is also himself. Making a surprise announcement that Mr Zuckerberg would be having dinner with an ordinary family is the kind of thing a Soviet dictator would do — down to the phalanx of personal aides he brought with him. This is not how scholars find out what ordinary families are thinking. Nor is it a good way to launch a political campaign. Ten months after Mr Zuckerberg began his tour, speculation of a presidential bid has been shelved. Say what you like about Donald Trump but he knows how to give the appearance of understanding ordinary people.

Helping Russia in its attempts to secure Trump’s election victory:

More to the point, Facebook has turned into a toxic commodity since Mr Trump was elected. Big Tech is the new big tobacco in Washington. It is not a question of whether the regulatory backlash will come, but when and how. Mr Zuckerberg bears responsibility for this. Having denied Facebook’s “filter bubble” played any role in Mr Trump’s victory — or Russia’s part in helping clinch it — Mr Zuckerberg is the primary target of the Democratic backlash. He is now asking America to believe that he can turn Facebook’s news feed from an echo chamber into a public square. Revenue growth is no longer the priority. “None of that matters if our services are used in a way that doesn’t bring people closer together,” he says.

Avoiding Tax (indirectly via Facebook) and masking self-interest:

How will Mr Zuckerberg arrange this Kumbaya conversion? By boosting the community ties that only Facebook can offer. Readers will forgive me if I take another lie down. Mr Zuckerberg suffers from two delusions common to America’s new economy elites. They think they are nice people — indeed, most of them are. Mr Zuckerberg seems to be, too. But they tend to cloak their self-interest in righteous language. Talking about values has the collateral benefit of avoiding talking about wealth. If the rich are giving their money away to good causes, such as inner city schools and research into diseases, we should not dwell on taxes. Mr Zuckerberg is not funding any private wars in Africa. He is a good person. The fact that his company pays barely any tax is therefore irrelevant.

Destroying communities and the noble profession of journalism:

The second liberal delusion is to believe they have a truer grasp of people’s interests than voters themselves. In some cases that might be true. It is hard to see how abolishing health subsidies will help people who live in “flyover” America. But here is the crux. It does not matter how many times Mr Zuckerberg invokes the magic of online communities. They cannot substitute for the real ones that have gone missing. Bowling online together is no cure for bowling offline alone. The next time Mr Zuckerberg wants to showcase Facebook, he should invest some of his money in an actual place. It should be far away from any of America’s booming cities — say Youngstown, Ohio. For the price of a couple of days’ Facebook revenues, he could train thousands of people. He might even fund a newspaper to make up for social media’s destruction of local journalism. The effect could be electrifying. Such an example would bring a couple more benefits. First, it would demonstrate that Mr Zuckerberg can listen, rather than pretending to. Second, people will want to drop round to his place for dinner.

Having dinner with Mark Zuckerberg was way down the list at ZH, with top choices including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Margaret Thatcher (if she was still alive), David Bowie (if he was still alive), John Lennon (ditto) and John F. Kennedy (ditto).

While we are finding the FT’s attempts at ridiculing Zuckerberg and his company entertaining, we are questioning whether it merely reflects the shifting political winds. Maybe there is more to it. When Pearson sold the Financial Times in 2015 after being the “proud proprietor” for almost 60 years, it cited the “inflection point in media, driven by the explosive growth of mobile and social”. 

Facebook Founder Warns "God Only Knows What It"s Doing To Kids" Brains"

38-year-old founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, was uncharacteristically frank about his creation in an interview with Axios. So much so in fact that he concluded, Mark Zuckerberg will probably block his account after reading this.

Confirming every "big brother" conspiracy there is about the social media giant, Parker explained how social networks purposely hook users and potentially hurt our brains...

"When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, "I"m not on social media." And I would say, "OK. You know, you will be." And then they would say, "No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy." And I would say, ... "We"ll get you eventually.""

 

"I don"t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it"s doing to our children"s brains."

 

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?""

 

"And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that"s going to get you to contribute more content, and that"s going to get you ... more likes and comments."

 

"It"s a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you"re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

 

"The inventors, creators — it"s me, it"s Mark [Zuckerberg], it"s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it"s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

In this "confessional", it appears Parker has become "something of a conscientious objector" on social media.

Howeever , as Axios notes, Parker ends with just enough crazy to make you wonder...

"Because I"m a billionaire, I"m going to have access to better health care so ... I"m going to be like 160 and I"m going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords. [Laughter]

 

Because, you know the [Warren Buffett] expression about compound interest. ... [G]ive us billionaires an extra hundred years and you"ll know what ... wealth disparity looks like."

Zuckerberg Fires Back At Trump, Admits "Russian Ads" Were Meaningless

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has responded to a Trump tweet from earlier this morning which suggested that Facebook, among other media outlets, were "always anti-Trump" from the beginning (we noted the Trump tweets here). 

In his response, Zuckerberg finally managed to interject some logic into the Left"s latest, and most entertaining "Russian collusion" narrative which continues to allege that $100,000 (one hundred thousand) worth of ad buys on Facebook managed to sway the outcome of the entire U.S. election. 

After acknowledging that he has recently found himself in the uncomfortable position of coming under attack by both the Left and Right for "helping" the other side, Zuckerberg pointed out, as have we on numerous occasions, that "campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online" which was "1000x more than any problematic ads we"ve found."

Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don"t like. That"s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That"s 1000x more than any problematic ads we"ve found.

Of course, we made this very point recently by charting how the $50,000 that "MAY" have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run "potentially politically related" ads compared to the roughly $1 billion in political ad revenue that Facebook generated in the U.S. over the same time period... 

That said, we"re rather shocked that any Silicon Valley tech billionaire would have the "courage" to prioritize truth over relentlessly toeing a party line whose ultimate purpose is to have a patriotic basis to shut down any media that offends the establishment narrative. Recall that it was one of Obama"s last acts to sign the "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" Into law last December. This is just the spectacle for the masses to obtain the needed public support to crack down on the first amendment.

As for Zuckerberg, we imagine that his efforts to spread the truth, rather than a carefully crafted media narrative approved by the Democratic party, will prove to be somewhat troublesome for him and/or his business at some point in the not so distant future, forcing the young CEO to "admit" that Hillary did in fact lose because of the "Russian ads" now that the original Trump collusion story appears dead and burried.

* * *

Here is the full text of Zuckerberg"s post:

I want to respond to President Trump"s tweet this morning claiming Facebook has always been against him.

Every day I work to bring people together and build a community for everyone. We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas.

Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don"t like. That"s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.

The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying:

- More people had a voice in this election than ever before. There were billions of interactions discussing the issues that may have never happened offline. Every topic was discussed, not just what the media covered.

- This was the first US election where the internet was a primary way candidates communicated. Every candidate had a Facebook page to communicate directly with tens of millions of followers every day.

- Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That"s 1000x more than any problematic ads we"ve found.

- We ran "get out the vote" efforts that helped as many as 2 million people register to vote. To put that in perspective, that"s bigger than the get out the vote efforts of the Trump and Clinton campaigns put together. That"s a big deal.

After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election.

We will continue to work to build a community for all people. We will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections. We"ll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy.

One Simple Chart Proves That Facebook Thinks You're A Moron

Last week we jokingly wrote about a Facebook press release that was apparently an honest effort by the social media giant intended to summarize Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 election using their social media platform. That said, at least to us, it seemed as though Facebook unwittingly proved what a farce the entire "Russian collusion" narrative had become as, after digging through advertising data for the better part of full year, Facebook reported that they found a "staggering" $50,000 worth of ad buys that "MAY" have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run "potentially politically related" ads.

Not surprisingly, after being attacked by the mainstream media and even Hillary for "assisting" the Russians, Zuckerberg is once again in the press today fanning the flames of the "Russian collusion" narrative by saying that Facebook will release to Congress the details of the 3,000 ads that "MAY" have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts.

And while it seems obvious, please allow us to once again demonstrate why this entire process is so utterly bizarre... 

The chart below demonstrates how the $50,000 worth of ad buys that "MAY" have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run "potentially politically related" ads compares to the $26.8 billion in ad revenue that Facebook generated in the U.S. over the same time period between 3Q 2015 and 2Q 2017....If $50,000 can swing an entire presidential election can you imagine what $26.8 billion can do?

Of course, not all of that $26.8 billion was spent on political advertising so we took a shot at breaking it down further.  While Facebook doesn"t disclose political spending as a percent of their overall advertising revenue, we did a little digging and found that political advertising represented ~5% of the overall ad market in the U.S. in 2016.  We further assumed that political share of the overall ad market is roughly half of that amount in non-election years, or 2.5%. 

Using that data, we figure that Facebook may get ~3.5% of their annual revenue from political advertising in an average year, or nearly $1 billion per year...give or take a few million.  Unfortunately, as the chart below once again demonstrates, this still does little to support Zuckerberg"s thesis that the $50,000 he keeps talking about is in any way relevant to the 2016 election.

Of course, the pursuit of this ridiculous narrative proves that Zuckerberg has no interest in spreading the truth about how his company impacted (and by "impacted," we mean "had no impact at all") the 2016 election, but rather is only interested in shoving his political agenda down the throats of an American public that he presumes is too stupid to question his propaganda. 

That said, if Zuckerberg is really just on a mission for truth, as he says he is, perhaps he can stop patronizing the American public and disclose the full facts surrounding political advertising on Facebook.  We suspect a simple financial disclosure detailing how much political advertising was sold on Facebook from 3Q 2015 - 2Q 2017, broken down by political affiliation, would go a long way toward proving just how meaningless $50,000 is in the grand scheme of things. 

That said, somehow we suspect "truth" is not really Zuckerberg"s end goal, now is it?

Make Mark Zuckerberg Testify

Last week, after what must have been a series of extremely grim meetings in Menlo Park, Facebook admitted publicly that part of its revenue includes what appears to be politically motivated fraud undertaken by a shady Russian company. The social network, perhaps motivated by a Washington Post scoop on the matter, released a statement outlining the issues at hand, but leaving the most important questions unanswered. Only Facebook knows these answers, and we should assume they won’t be eager to volunteer them.

After last week’s reports, Facebook received a round of emails and calls from reporters asking for clarifications on the many glaring gaps in the social network’s disclosure:

• What was the content of the Russian-backed ads in question?


• How many people saw these ads? How many people clicked them?


• What were the Facebook pages associated with the ads? How many members did they have?


• What specific targeting criteria (race, age, and most importantly, location) did the Russian ads choose?

Given that Facebook reaches a little under 30 percent of the entire population of our planet, the answers to these questions matter.

The response I received from Facebook PR (“We are not commenting beyond the blog post at this time”) is typical.

But even when Facebook does decide to talk to journalists, it has the tenor of an occult priest discussing something from beyond an eerie void: Just last week, when faced with a report that its advertising numbers promised an American audience that, in certain demographics, well exceeded the number of such humans in existence, judging by U.S. Census Bureau numbers, Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that its numbers “are not designed to match population or census estimates. We are always working to improve our estimates.” Facebook’s intercourse with the public need not adhere to the so-called norms of so-called reality.

But beyond the technology sector’s penchant for PR non-statements and Facebook’s understandable reluctance to further insinuate itself into the political controversy of the decade is the fact that complete inscrutability is just the way the company works. Facebook, even more than Apple, which has taken corporate secrecy to quasi-military lengths, operates as a black box. No one outside of the company knows exactly how the site’s algorithms, by which media and advertising industries now live and die, function. Academics and other researchers must go on what can be learned of Facebook merely by using Facebook. “Many of us wish we could study Facebook,” professor Philip Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute told The Guardian in May, “but we can’t, because they really don’t share anything.” When details of how Facebook suppresses certain content and amplifies other information leaks, it becomes a media sensation.

At the same time as it operates in near-total opacity, Facebook trumpets just how well the black box works; its advertising case study library is ample, including stories boasting how Facebook can swing political elections. Facebook crucially never makes it clear exactly how it will help you win an election (or sell more fried chicken, or bracelets, or subscriptions). It just does. This magical efficacy, the company’s apparently unparalleled power to make people look at and maybe even click on things, is helping Facebook reach quarter after quarter of mammoth profits and swallow whole larger and larger chunks of advertising and media around the world. This is disturbing enough if you happen to work at a newspaper, but ought to be something even beyond disturbing if you happen to be a citizen of any country in the world.

Facebook prides itself on its ability to create successful influence campaigns at the same time that a foreign influence campaign against the U.S. is pretty much the only story anyone cares about (and lest we forget, just last November, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote the whole thing off as “pretty crazy”). Today, we have reason to believe the two are connected. And while $100,000 is a pittance to Facebook, the bottom line is that even Facebook is willing to admit to the existence of bad-faith efforts to persuade its users by entities unknown and for purposes unknown. Shouldn’t the roughly 80 percent of Americans who use Facebook know as much as possible about how they’re being remotely manipulated?

It’s good and worthwhile that Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are probing the company’s ability to influence political thought and action, and that Facebook staffers have briefed the House and Senate intelligence committees, but if this is truly a democratic crisis, it can’t be a closed-door crisis.

Zuckerberg should publicly testify under oath before Congress on his company’s capabilities to influence the political process, be it Russian meddling or anything else.

If the company is as powerful as it promises advertisers, it should be held accountable.

And if it’s not, then we need to stop fretting so much about it.

Either way, threats to entire societies should be reckoned with publicly by those very societies and not confined to R&D labs and closed-door briefings. If democracy can be gamed from a laptop, that shouldn’t be considered a trade secret.

Nearly 80 years ago, then-junior Sen. Harry Truman began a seven-year inquiry into American military waste, largely targeting the vast scale with which private corporations were duping and defrauding the public to enrich themselves. Military contractors aren’t known for their transparency or willingness to level with the public, so it had to be pried from them — the process saved an estimated $230 billion in today’s dollars. In 1994, tobacco executives were brought before Congress to testify under oath as to the threat their ubiquitous social product posed to the public.

David Carroll, a professor of media design at the New School and director of its Design and Technology MFA program, has been a vocal critic of Facebook’s business practices through the 2016 election. Carroll told The Intercept he believes “the public needs to hear Zuckerberg respond to crucial questions in his voice and in his words as the custodian of most of the public’s personal data, social relationships, and media consumption.” In particular, Carroll thinks Zuckerberg ought to explain the fact that bad actors are good business: “How is he going to protect future elections while also fulfilling his fiduciary duty, which is going to involve ‘leaving money on the table’ — how is he going to do it?”

Ron Fein is the legal director of Free Speech For People, an advocacy group targeting corporate influence in democratic processes. Last year, FSFP filed a formal complaint against the Russian government and President Donald Trump with the Federal Election Commission over what it described as “violations of the federal campaign finance law prohibiting foreign nationals from spending money in U.S. elections, including through paid social media.” The group is not getting any less angry after last week’s Facebook news, and Fein is among those who’d like to see Zuckerberg testify before Congress. He told The Intercept:

In the past, advertising was all public. If the Russian government had bought advertising in an election in the 1980s or 90s, it would have been on television, radio, or newspaper ads that anyone could see. We would know what the ads said, and where they were shown.

Facebook ads are only visible to the users that the advertiser, using Facebook’s proprietary algorithm, chooses to target. We don’t know what the ads said, or who saw them. The public can’t understand the scope of the problem of foreign election interference if Facebook continues to insist on secrecy. We can’t fully protect ourselves from future election interference if the only information we have is what Facebook has chosen to share to this point. Right now, our laws prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence U.S. elections, but that is difficult to prove if the only evidence is what Facebook chooses to disclose.

Mark Zuckerberg’s open testimony could be very helpful in helping Congress and the public understand what happened in the 2016 campaign, and what risks we face in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the effect of technology on political communications and practices, is one of the many researchers around the world frustrated by Facebook’s unwillingness to explain how Facebook may or may not affect over 2 billion people — many of them potential voters. Kreiss admitted he’s unsure of “whether there’s the political will to bring Zuckerberg in and make him answer questions about Facebook’s role in the election,” but that it could answer long overdue questions. “I just find it stunning that we’re learning about these ad buys 10 months after the election is over as opposed to when they would’ve been consequential,” he said. But, Kreiss says, we also can’t be certain it was ever consequential: Facebook’s crucial advertising and algorithmic data is “not public,” meaning “academics can’t go in and really clearly analyze the effects of advertising, let’s say, on the members of electorate, in a rigorous way. … That data isn’t independently verifiable, therefore it’s just what fuels speculation. The point is we can’t really know.” And that’s by design.

It’s reassuring that Facebook is cooperating with the ongoing Russia-related probes. But this is bigger than Russia, bigger than Hillary Clinton, and bigger than 2016. Should Facebook continue to simply allude to its ominous potential rather than sharing it in full, there’s only one good option left: Bring in Mark Zuckerberg and have him sworn in live on C-SPAN. No spokespeople required.

"Sad Day For Our Country": Zuckerberg Slams Decision To End DACA: "Not Just Wrong, It Is Particularly Cruel"

In a statement issued moments after AG Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama"s DACA Program, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page that "It’s time for Congress to act to pass the bipartisan Dream Act or another legislative solution that gives Dreamers a pathway to citizenship."

The CEO writes that while "no bill is perfect, inaction now is unacceptable" and adds that "the decision to end DACA is not just wrong. It is particularly cruel.”  Zuckerberg also writes that team FWD.us, which Zuckerberg is a member of, will do even more in the weeks ahead to make sure Dreamers have protections.

Some have speculated that this latest openly political statement, is Zuckerberg"s latest foray into the political arena, and perhaps a confirmation of recent rumors, that Zuck may be running for office in the coming years.

His full statement is below:

This is a sad day for our country. The decision to end DACA is not just wrong. It is particularly cruel to offer young people the American Dream, encourage them to come out of the shadows and trust our government, and then punish them for it.

The young people covered by DACA are our friends and neighbors. They contribute to our communities and to the economy. I"ve gotten to know some Dreamers over the past few years, and I"ve always been impressed by their strength and sense of purpose. They don"t deserve to live in fear.

DACA protects 800,000 Dreamers -- young people brought to this country by their parents. Six months from today, new DACA recipients will start to lose their ability to work legally and will risk immediate deportation every day.

It"s time for Congress to act to pass the bipartisan Dream Act or another legislative solution that gives Dreamers a pathway to citizenship. For years, leaders from both parties have been talking about protecting Dreamers. Now it"s time to back those words up with action. Show us that you can lead. No bill is perfect, but inaction now is unacceptable.

Our team at FWD.us has been working alongside Dreamers in this fight, and we"ll be doing even more in the weeks ahead to make sure Dreamers have the protections they deserve.

If you live in the US, call your members of Congress and tell them to do the right thing. We have always been a nation of immigrants, and immigrants have always made our nation stronger. You can learn more and get connected at Dreamers.FWD.us.

"F**k Zuck 2020" Posters Appear In California As Facebook CEO Hires Hillary Strategist

After news broke of the hiring of Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, we noted that the odds of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg running for President in 2020 surged and bookies positioned him as more likely to win than current establishment favorite Kamale Harris.

While many of Silicon Valley"s technorati quietly applaud the move, it seems that not everyone "likes" the idea of him being president...

As AmericanMirror.com reports, Los Angeles street artist Sabo recently posted several Facebook photos showing his latest work: “F*ck Zuck 2020” street art in Pasadena.

The poster features the familiar Facebook hand with the blue cuff, except Sabo modified it with a middle finger:

The signs even appeared over the traffic lights...

As Liberty Blitzkrieg"s Mike Krieger recently concluded, it’s not just Benenson that Zuck is hiring as we saw in the Politico article earlier. He’s hiring a smattering of corporate Democratic strategists and consultants (and even a George W. Bush alum). This tells you so much about who this guy really is and what he believes. He wanders around the country claiming to want to understand “the people” and then he shuffles right over to Clinton/Obama people for wisdom. He doesn’t really want to hear from the rabble or promote genuine populist change, he just wants to be the technocratic leader of another firmly neoliberal American government. That’s all this is.

Much of how Zuckerberg operates focuses on image instead of substance, as we saw throughout his cross-country narcissism tour. Not that this should be a surprise coming from the creator of Facebook, a platform designed so that people can carefully craft a fake public image of themselves for their “friends” to admire.

All of this proves that Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no creativity or genuine insight when it comes to political thinking. He runs straight to the same neoliberal strategists and corporate Democrats that Americans are sick and tired of, and offers nothing new other than a technocratic face on a failed and expired political class. Ten million cross country road trips to Iowa will never alter this reality.

Mapping America's Most Misspelled Words

Amid Murica"s spelling-bee week, Google mapped the nation"s most mis-spelled words...

"Sauerkraut" in Pennsylvania, "Chaos" in Tennessee, Diarrhea" in New Hampshire, and "Chihuahua" in South Carolina"?

Source: Google

And here are the most-used words in each state...

Source: xkcd.com

Intellectual Property Rights Give Zuckerberg His Fake Size

Via The Daily Bell

Facebook Plans to Rewire Your Life. Be Afraid ... Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg"s manifesto, penned clearly in response to accusations leveled at the social network in the wake of the bitter U.S. election campaign, is a scary, dystopian document. It shows that Facebook -- launched, in Zuckerberg"s own words five years ago, to "extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships" -- is turning into something of an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest young men in the world with a company that spans the globe. And now he is putting that company to work defining what fake news is and is not. To help him in this task he has has recruited other like Snopes.

Snopes is run by a man who just divorced the co-founder to marry someone else. They seem to publish way too many articles for their small staff. Some have speculated the CIA is helping them. But no one is saying, exactly. So it"s speculation.

Zuckerberg says he"s done the best he can to build an unimpeachable references organization to help him decide what is fake and what isn"t. Presumably he will change it as necessary.

More:

In 2012, Zuckerberg addressed future Facebook investors in a letter attached to the company"s initial public offering prospectus. Here"s how he described the company"s purpose:

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

The article points that whatever Zuckerberg has intended to do, it has largely failed. That includes his upcoming effort to differentiate between real and fake news.

And it points out that Zuckerberg has actually made anxieties worse for a number of people. That"s because Facebook is ultimately a competitive situation with everyone trying to create a perfect online life. This caused people overall to have less life satisfaction when using Facebook, not more.

The same thing happens when new mothers get on Facebook to share the joys of newfound parenting. "Failing to get enough ... validation causes depressive symptoms." In other words the exposure to others who seem to be doing better than you, once again turns Facebook into software that is damaging to individuals rather than life-affirming.

But from our point of view, Zuckerberg shouldn"t be where he is anyway. The CIA apparently built up his operation and its size and scale is dependent on various post Civil War decisions. The CIA wants the real-time data that Facebook is collecting from over a billion people (or so we are told).

Chief among the court decisions are elaborations of corporate personhood and intellectual property rights. Also fiat, central-bank money and various kinds of regulation that only very large companies can fully fulfill.

For Zuckerberg, it is probably intellectual property rights that are among the most important parts of his empire. An article entitled From Zero to Zuckerberg tells the tale of just how critical IP is.

Firstly, protecting your IP enables your company to differentiate itself from other businesses and can act as its unique selling point, often helping it to secure future investment.

In fact, many VCs may not back a business at all if its IP isn’t protected. It can be seen as vulnerable to competitors — especially larger, cash-heavy companies who can swoop in and replicate it — and therefore too risky to scale. Put it another way, IP effectively ensures that the ‘new’ Zuckerberg can exist.

IP has virtually lifted Zuckerberg into the position he is in today. The idea that software telling people about the lives of other similar people can be worth literally trillions is based on what society has decided to protect

There is no reason why society should protect IP. If Zuckerberg want protection, he should pay for it himself. Right now you and I pay.

Zuckerberg is worth tens of billions based on post Civil War decisions that back up IP ideas that shouldn"t have been debated in the first place. The only people IP helps these days, for the most part, are those with the very largest companies like Zuckerberg"s.

IP helped Zuckerberg build what is essentially a false company. Now he is compounding the problem. Because of his size he is becoming an arbiter of what is and is not Fake News.

Conclusion: Zuckerberg will push forward on this track, perhaps oblivious to the ridiculousness of his position. He shouldn"t be where he is, and his current size has as much to do with the CIA as it does with IP determinations. Put together the two influences built a behemoth. It shouldn"t exist but it does.

‘The World Needs Globalization, It Needs Trade’ 

Republicans Reeling in Fed?

Trump’s Complications in Draining the Swamp
 

and many more, just a click away ...

Protesters Plot "Border Wall" Rally For Tomorrow...At Zuckerberg's Sprawling $100mm Hawaiian Estate

Back in 2014 Mark Zuckerberg paid $100 million to purchase 700 acres of beachfront property on the North Shore of Kauai.  The estate includes 1,000"s of feet of pristine shoreline providing the perfect "safe space" for the 30-year-old Silicon Valley Billionaire and his family.

Unfortunately, there was just one little problem with the purchase...technically the sellers didn"t own the title to all of that land due to the so-called Kuleana Act, a Hawaiian law established in 1850 that for the first time gave natives the right to own the land that they lived on. 

So now, according to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the Facebook billionaire sued a few hundred Hawaiians who still have legal-ownership claims to parts of his vacation estate through their ancestors.  Per Yahoo Finance:

Three holding companies controlled by Zuckerberg filed eight lawsuits in local court on December 30 against families who collectively inherited 14 parcels of land through the Kuleana Act, a Hawaiian law established in 1850 that for the first time gave natives the right to own the land that they lived on.

The 14 parcels total just 8.04 of the 700 acres Zuckerberg owns, but the law gives any direct family member of a parcel"s original owner the right to enter the otherwise private compound.

And while Zuckerberg"s lawyer attempted to downplay the lawsuits as a common practice in Hawaii, we suspect the idea of defending your private property rights against one of the top 10 richest people in the world is somewhat intimidating and slightly less than "normal."

The quiet-title suits filed are designed to identify all property owners and give them the ability to sell their ownership stakes at auction, according to Keoni Shultz, an attorney representing Zuckerberg. Because the ownership stakes are passed down and divided among family descendants by the state, many people don"t realize they have a claim until action is taken against them in court.

“It is common in Hawaii to have small parcels of land within the boundaries of a larger tract, and for the title to these smaller parcels to have become broken or clouded over time," Shultz told Business Insider in a statement. "In some cases, co-owners may not even be aware of their interests. Quiet title actions are the standard and prescribed process to identify all potential co-owners, determine ownership, and ensure that, if there are other co-owners, each receives appropriate value for their ownership share.”

Of course, the pompous dismissal of property rights isn"t the only thing riling up Hawaiian natives regarding Zuckerberg"s estate.  As The Garden Island pointed out, residents are also slightly less than ecstatic about a massive, 6 foot rock wall erected around the estate and blocking the "view that’s been available and appreciative by the community here for years."

“The feeling of it is really oppressive. It’s immense,” Hall said. “It’s really sad that somebody would come in, and buy a huge piece of land and the first thing they do is cut off this view that’s been available and appreciative by the community here for years.”

"It’s hot behind that wall. Because it’s up on a berm, there’s not a breath of air on this side from the ocean,” Chantara said. “You take a solid wall that’s 10 or more feet above the road level; the breeze can’t go through.”

Another Kilauea resident, Donna Mcmillen, calls the wall a “monstrosity.”

"I’m super unhappy about that. I know that land belongs to Zuckerberg. Money is no option for him. I’m 5’8” and when I’m walking, I see nothing but wall,” Mcmillen said. “It just doesn’t fit in with the natural beauty that we have here. There are people on the island who money can pay for anything. These kind of things that they do take away what Kauai is all about.”

Over the past couple of weeks, intense public backlash over the lawsuit and "immense, oppressive" wall has caused Zuckerberg to backtrack on his plans. Earlier today he published a note to residents in The Garden Island announcing his intentions to drop his litigation saying that "upon reflection, it"s clear we made a mistake."

We"ve heard from many in the community and learned more about the cultural and historical significance of this land. Over the past week, we"ve spoken with community leaders and shared that our intention is to achieve an outcome that preserves the environment, respects local traditions, and is fair to those with kuleana lands.

To find a better path forward, we are dropping our quiet title actions and will work together with the community on a new approach. We understand that for native Hawaiians, kuleana are sacred and the quiet title process can be difficult. We want to make this right, talk with the community, and find a better approach.

Upon reflection, I regret that I did not take the time to fully understand the quiet title process and its history before we moved ahead. Now that I understand the issues better, it"s clear we made a mistake.

The right path is to sit down and discuss how to best move forward. We will continue to speak with community leaders that represent different groups, including native Hawaiians and environmentalists, to find the best path.

Beyond this process, we are also looking for more ways to support the community as neighbors. We have contributed to community organizations and will continue to do so. We work with wildlife experts to preserve endangered species. We hope to do much more in the future.

We love Kaua`i and we want to be good members of the community for the long term. Thank you for welcoming our family into your community.

But, a local farmer, Joe Hart says that Zuckerberg"s retreat isn"t sufficient and, as of now, vows that the mass protest planned for tomorrow will move forward as "people are furious down here with him."  Per McClatchey:

“People are furious down here with him,” Hart, a local farmer told Business Insider. “We just want to bring this issue to light. He’s made his money stealing everyone’s information, which we’ve let him do, but to come down here and start suing everyone, that’s not going to fly down here.”

Alas, in the end we"re sure Zuckerberg will have his way.  After all, what fun is billions of dollars if you can"t buy expansive swaths of entire states and trample on the private property rights of some little people?

"He Wants To Be Emperor" – How Mark Zuckerberg Is Scheming To Become President

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

At this point, I’ve seen enough. It’s becoming quite clear that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants to be President of these United States.

The topic first piqued my interest about a week ago when I read an article published at Vanity Fair titled, Will Mark Zuckerberg be Our Next President?

Increasingly, a number of influential people in Silicon Valley seem to think that Mark Zuckerberg will likely run for president of the United States one day. And some people, including myself, believe that he could indeed win. “He wants to be emperor” is a phrase that has become common among people who have known him over the years.

We’ll get to my theory on what that means a little later. First, let’s zip through the myriad indications that he might choose to throw his hoodie into the ring. Last year’s Facebook proxy statement articulated that Zuckerberg can run for office and still maintain control of his company. (To this end, Trump’s controversial precedent may facilitate any thorny political complications regarding the matter.) Then, over the holidays, Zuckerberg responded to a question about being an atheist, a belief he once professed, with a decidedly more politically circumspect answer: “I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.” (No one likes a president who doesn’t believe in some sort of God.) More recently, President Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, joined the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to lead policy and advocacy. Other politicians from both parties have also joined the organization. And then there was the most obvious intimation: earlier this year, Zuckerberg, who has a habit of posting his annual New Year’s resolution on his Facebook page, declared that after conquering the previous challenges of learning Mandarin, and building an artificial-intelligence butler for his home, this year he was going to meet “people in every state in the US.” He noted that he’s “spent significant time in many states already, so I’ll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge.” I wonder how many of those states are swing states?

If he does want the job, Zuckerberg definitely has the personality for it. When Facebook went public in 2012, I co-authored a profile of the young C.E.O. During the reporting, I heard from several friends about his penchant for playing world-conquering board and video games. Early childhood pals told me that one of Zuckerberg’s favorite video games as a boy was Civilization, the game in which you have to “build an empire to stand the test of time.” Others have told me that, to this day, Zuckerberg loves to play Risk, a strategy board game where you have to essentially take over the world. Believe it or not, he ended up applying some of these theories while forging and managing the extraordinary growth of Facebook, organizing his product teams in similar ways to his battalions in the board games. (According to someone close to him, these days Zuckerberg loves Game of Thrones and enjoys cooking a meat-laden “Dothraki Feast” while watching Westeros fall in and out of anarchy.)

Then, this morning, I came across the following tweets.

Zuck straight up delivering stump speeches on his Facebook page now pic.twitter.com/U5R9VB8Hk6

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 19, 2017

Zuck: "We may come from different backgrounds, but we all want to find purpose and authenticity in something bigger than ourselves." Hmmm

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 19, 2017

Zuck recap:
1) No longer an atheist
2) Will visit every state
3) Hires Obama 2008 campaign manager
4) .....https://t.co/j6KroIKGEX

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 10, 2017

If that’s not enough for you, how about the team of 12 people now working on his personal page to make sure it’s perfectly pristine. Bloomberg reports:

When Facebook went public five years ago, the world had a pretty vivid picture of who Mark Zuckerberg was. As much as anything, that image was of Jesse Eisenberg’s fictionalized performance as Zuckerberg in The Social Network: an intense, socially inept kid billionaire who always wore a hoodie, whether he was meeting with financiers or trying to screw a co-founder in court. Over the past couple of years, Zuckerberg has made a concerted effort to steer his image in a different direction.

Near the end of 2014, he began holding Q&A sessions with groups of people wherever he was traveling around the world, fielding softballs ranging from lessons on startup-building to his favorite pizza toppings. Those town halls have evolved into near-daily posts on Zuckerberg’s own Facebook page, mixing news of company milestones with personal epiphanies, soft-focus photos from his life as a new dad, and responses to user comments. “What he’s learned over the last two years is that his image in the digital domain needs to be controlled,” says David Charron, who teaches entrepreneurship at the University of California at Berkeley. “And he’s simply growing up.”

Zuckerberg has help, lots of it. Typically, a handful of Facebook employees manage communications just for him, helping write his posts and speeches, while an additional dozen or so delete harassing comments and spam on his page, say two people familiar with the matter. Facebook also has professional photographers snap Zuckerberg, say, taking a run in Beijing or reading to his daughter. Among them is Charles Ommanney, known most recently for his work covering the refugee crisis for the Washington Post. Company spokeswoman Vanessa Chan says Facebook is an easy way for executives to connect with various audiences.

While plenty of chief executive officers have image managers, the scale of this team is something different.

Naturally, Zuck doesn’t spend all of his free time smooching on Texas babies. So what’s he doing in between the professional photo shoots, Dothraki feasts, and playing cuddly tech oligarch for “ordinary” Americans? Well he’s suing native Hawaiians to get off his 700-acre, $100 million estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, of course.

As reported by the Daily Mail:

Mark Zuckerberg is suing Hawaiian families in an attempt to get them to sell their land to make his 700-acre property more secluded, a Honolulu newspaper reported Wednesday.

 

Almost a dozen of small parcels on the Facebook co-founder’s $100 million Kauai property belong to Hawaiian citizens who acquired them through legislation dating back to 1850, called the Kuleana Act, according to the Star Advertiser.

 

As such, these land owners are allowed to walk through Zuckerberg’s domain. But the billionaire is believed to have filed lawsuits against a few hundred people in the hope that they will sell their parcels at a public auction.

 

Using the law to induce land sales, which isn’t uncommon in Hawaii, can be viewed as problematic because it severs the native Hawaiian community’s link to ancestral land.

 

Zuckerberg is believed to have sued a few hundred people via several companies that he controls, the Star Advertiser reported. Some of these people, who inherited or owned interest in the land, are dead.

 

Similar auctions have in the past led to below-market sales, but according to the Star Advertiser, some of those involved in the Zuckerberg cases believe the billionaire will offer a fair amount of money.

I know that’s a lot to take in, so let me end this post with a little humor.

No, that’s not real.

Harvard Is 'Billionaire-Making' University

Want to learn about the history of economics, how to code with Ruby on Rails, or the essentials of string theory? It’s all out there for free on the internet, and anyone who has the time or energy can learn it directly from the experts.

The Information Age grants us an unprecedented amount of access to the world’s knowledge – and some thinkers like James Altucher or Peter Thiel see this leading to a path where the role of colleges and universities will continue to diminish.

We share that sentiment. The most recent crop of successful entrepreneurs like Evan Spiegel or Mark Zuckerberg already proves that entrepreneurs can make billions without spending a full four years in the classroom. The forthcoming generation will be even less tied to attending brick-and-mortar institutions.

However, as Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, there’s one caveat to this line of thought, however, and it coincides with this week’s chart. While one can say that the actual academic value of these institutions may be undermined by access to the digital world, the value of these as places to “rub shoulders” with up-and-comers still remains entrenched.

A BILLIONAIRE MAKING MACHINE

Talk to any successful person in business and they will tell you that developing a strong network is half of the battle. As far as schools go, Harvard is the perfect example of the “network effect” at work.

To date, a total of 35 of the richest 500 people in the world have emerged from the storied halls of Harvard. In fact, more billionaires have graduated from Harvard than all of those hailing from Saudi Arabia and Spain combined.

The total net worth of the top 35 Harvard billionaire graduates? It’s $309 billion – roughly equivalent to the GDP of Hong Kong or Ireland. With alumni like Charlie Munger, Meg Whitman, John Paulson, Steve Ballmer, Paul Singer, Ken Griffin, Ray Dalio, and Michael Bloomberg among the ranks of Harvard graduates, it’s a powerful hub to tap into. Today’s Harvard students and professors take advantage of this prestigious network every day.

Elite universities still serve as filtering mechanisms that only bring in students that are smart, well-connected, or both. Top schools like Stanford or Harvard have acceptance rates less than 6%, and this exclusivity gives graduating students a connected and privileged network from the get-go.

One hundred years from now, will these institutions still have the same track records from the exclusivity factor alone? It remains to be seen, but for now they are still undisputed billionaire making machines until proven otherwise.