Facebook head of news cofounded site critical of Elizabeth Warren
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The articles posted on this site were critical of Warren because of Warren’s opposition to school choice, but has also criticized the other Democratic candidates for taking the same position: https://www.the74million.org/article/stewart-the-democratic-....
The attempt to make it seem like the criticism of Warren on this site has anything to do with Facebook is pretty weak. The site was started long before Warren said anything critical about Facebook. The site also has a good faith basis for being critical of Warren in this front. Warren’s opposition to school choice highlights a distressing fissure within the Democratic Party: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/19/08/ednext-poll-democrats...
> African American Democrats support targeted school vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools at 70%, 60%, and 55%, respectively. Among Hispanic Democrats, support for the three policies is at 67%, 60%, and 47%. On the other hand, just 40% of non-Hispanic White Democrats support targeted vouchers, 46% support universal vouchers, and 33% support charter schools.
The site is addressing a real debate within the Democratic Party, consistent with its founding principles, not using some contrived pretext to attack Warren for her comments about Facebook.
As a general principle, decentralization is good.
Charter and voucher schools ARE public education, they just aren't part of the traditional monolithic bureaucracy. The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
They also traditionally get to pick and choose who can attend, which often means excluding costly students like any that have disabilities.
> The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments, free from the existing hierarchy, is the quality improvement that proponents are striving for.
Great. Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
We both know that's not why you take issue with school choice because these kinds of issues can be easily adjusted through policy changes - but you're not proposing policy changes. You want to completely get rid of the entire thing.
And by the way, in the cases of kids with extreme behavioural issues, those kids are also routinely expelled from the public system schools. So again, what are you arguing?
>Let's apply "move fast and break things" to education. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you try and not distort arguments? Nobody except you argued this.
Earlier:
>The ability to try different approaches and run different experiments to see if it results in different outcomes, and make fast adjustments
How is that not "move fast and break things"?
> And by the way, in the cases of kids with extreme behavioural issues
I specifically said children with disabilities. I think it says a lot about you that you're trying to re-frame that as kids with behavioral issues.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
Here's an example of charter school: A school that runs their curriculum partially in a foreign language (e.g. French for social sciences, but math in English) so that children pick up a second language while doing regular studies. Is that an example of "move fast and break things"? Implementing something like this would be very hard in a public system. The inertia is too great. That's just one example of a charter/voucher school being responsive to local needs in a way that would be hard for the largely public system (and I'm not saying charters/voucher replace the public system).
What you did was purposely apply a term from programming and startups to my argument for charters and voucher schools. It doesn't apply. Education is never going to be run like a startup with a 20-something founder. EVER. No parent will let a school 'break' their kids' education. But within those constraints, you can try things a little differently to tailor how and what you teach.
>I specifically said children with disabilities. I think it says a lot about you that you're trying to re-frame that as kids with behavioral issue
No. It was an example that shows the public system is also struggling with kids with disablities (in this case, kids with behavioural issues). But that wasn't the salient point. Ignore it. The primary point was just above it: "We both know that's not why you take issue with school choice because these kinds of issues can be easily adjusted through policy changes - but you're not proposing policy changes. You want to completely get rid of the entire thing."
It's not reasonable to expect everyone to crusade for reform. I want what's best for my kids now, and if that's a charter school, that's what I'm aiming for.
We've inherited the world we deserve. If we want to make it better, we have to earn it. If you don't want to do that, fine, but then you don't get to complain about the results.
Who's "we" here? The people putting the politicians you're talking about into office are not likely the people who would benefit most by sending their children to charter schools. So what is that person supposed to do?
Everyone, generally speaking. It isn't like the kinds of anti-public-service politicians I'm talking about only ever get votes from the 1%, or even just the 50%.
Sure - despite being proven that charter schools (ie, free choice) have worse or equivalent scores to public schools [1]. There is not agreement here, there is controversy and the facts are not on the so-called "free markets" side.
Having said that, don't dismiss the idea of choice. Parents, for all kinds of reasons, may not want to be funneled to the specific school or schools they are limited to geographically, and may want to have a different kind of instruction (i.e. they want CHOICE). Opponents of 'school choice' always miss this point.
Charter school discriminate in responsiveness to requests [1] in admissions against special-needs and the poor (ie, the hard cases). Public schools simply can't do this.
[1] https://www.futurity.org/charter-schools-students-1937902/
So instead of implementing policies to make sure the choice is available to all, your approach is to remove this choice from everyone and funnel them through the same monolithic system?
Nothing you argued, even if true (and I suspect you're not an objective observer either), is unsolvable through policy or regulatory changes.
Clearly the solution can't be privatized 'school choice' because the people who need it the most will probably not be able to afford it, and it segregates society further, giving everyone even less stake in repairing their communities. It's a self-defeating cycle.
Don't be dense. Those are generational issues to solve. There is enough inertia in the system that solutions if there are any, will take decades to manifest. You know this. And nobody will sacrifice their children at the altar of 'social justice' as espoused online by 20something who doesn't know any better. No, they want their children to be safe, and get a quality education.
It points out Brown is friends with Betsy DeVos.
It points out that Eric Owens, a far-right regular writer for the Daily Caller, has written 11 articles for The 74.
I agree that the part about Warren is grasping at straws a bit. I think it's more interesting that Brown is right leaning, yet she's in charge of FB News. So far, FB News is showing many signs it will be right biased. This just adds more evidence.
The other evidence is the inclusion of Breitbart, but no leftist publications. Also, the fact that Zuckerberg has been having dinners with far-right figures, but no leftists.
You can't claim you have no position while simultaneously taking actions that benefit one side or another. If they're going to go that route, they might as well just come out and say what their bias is rather than gaslighting people into thinking that they're neutral.
If Facebook treated Brown’s advocacy for school choice as disqualifying, that would actually be an indicator of extreme left-wing bias.
This doesn’t seem like a reputable source for making the argument that voters actually support this policy.
School choice isn’t a “conservative” policy. Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc., have extensive school choice. The US is actually an outlier in the OECD for prohibiting private schools from getting any public funding: http://www.oecd.org/education/School-choice-and-school-vouch...
What is the hnews policy for when "politics" collides with "tech"? These articles are only going to be more common as the election approaches.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19769679
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
If you still have questions they don't answer, let me know what they are and I'll add to the set.
Many here either work at FB or are reliant on their network for work related activities.
All of this would be a whole lot less critical if Facebook did what Twitter did and bowed out of taking political ad money.
We don't even hold ourselves accountable for our actions in this industry.
Facebook is the opposite of this, with their closed systems, back door dealings and often shady business practices it makes perfect sense that they are opposed to her.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(if we can find a way to forgive and forget Judge Boof's college "hijinks" I think we can find a way to forgive this.)
I think it's plausible to be told something about your heritage and not question it, especially if it's something spanning multiple generations where the paperwork validating the claim is either nonexistent or otherwise hard to reach. At varying points I've been told by relatives that I'm part Scottish, and told by others that I'm not, and I don't really have a straightforward way of validating this aside from engaging in some intensive research.
I can reasonably extend the benefit of the doubt to Elizabeth Warren that she didn't know if she was actually some fraction Native American or not until the DNA test.
But she didn't claim to be 'some fraction Native American'. She said her race was 'Native American', just full-on 'Native American', on an official form.
And she claimed to be Cherokee in a book. That's even more bizarre of a thing to claim. No matter what anyone told her, she must have known she wasn't part of the tribe?
People say she's apologised, but she hasn't really said 'I'm sorry that I...' except that she's caused distress. What does she now admit she did? Lied? Stretched the truth? What does she see it as? What was going through her head. What would lead her to make such obviously ludicrous claims? Even if she did have one recent ancestor, which it turns out she probably didn't, it's still a nonsense claim that she is Native American and Cherokee.
Does she still think she's Native American? Will she describe herself as the first Native American president? If she doesn't, what does she say is the difference between now and when she filled out that form? That's what I'm missing - her explanation.
Warren found a politically convenient fractional truth and exploited it.
There isn't a pattern of deceit on her part, this "debacle" wasn't a sin of great consequence, all the while it is pushed over and over by someone whose entire life is built on manufacturing falsehoods. "Both sides do it" doesn't apply here. It is like saying I can't be critical of a murderer because I too broke the law by speeding.
"I think it's plausible to be told something about your heritage and not question it"
The world is sloppy, its not perfect, people are not perfect. In the end I dont care about that.
Their decision to accept paid lies (ads) by candidates (as opposed to Twitter) should tell us everything we need to know that FB views the targeted conspiracy-theory factually untrue bullshit - as a thing to be embraced (nay, not to avoid) - all for profit.
Time will tell if they permit all such ads or only the ones that they prefer.
This has already been answered. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/29/tech/facebook-california-cand...
> Adriel Hampton, a political activist, registered as a candidate for California's 2022 gubernatorial election on Monday so he could take advantage of Facebook's policy allowing politicians and political candidates to run false ads on the platform.
> On Tuesday evening, a Facebook (FB) spokesperson told CNN Business, "This person has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies, so his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking."
The rules will be enforced arbitrarily only when FB wants.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-mille...
Edit:
Good lord people. SPLC has a cache of emails from Stephen Miller written to various people at Breitbart about reporting their stories with explicit white nationalist ideology. You don't have to like SPLC to believe the leaked emails any more than you had to like Wikileaks to believe the leaked DNC emails.
Here's another source if you don't want to give them clicks: https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-pushed-racist-s...
If that's all, it's really interesting that it became white nationalist in SPLC's reporting...
I for one love capitalism and would rather send my child to a charter rather than the high school near my apartment, where the Dean of Peace Relations was recently convicted for attempted murder of a student he recruited to deal drugs.[0]
People without any means are forced to send their children to the monopoly school if they can't afford private and there are no charters. School choice is always preferable.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/05/31/shaun-harrison-guilty-b...