Former Facebook Employees: "We Were Jawboned. Repeatedly. Routinely."
knightcolumbia.org
knightcolumbia.org
No sale. Long before the 2016 election FB would 'jail' users for posting pictures of statues in museums for violating its 'no nudity' policy. Zuck was fond of saying how if FB was a country it would have the largest population on earth. Guess what, that exposes them to diplomatic lobbying, which is how most things get done between polities.
It goes beyond content moderation. Please remember the root cause of failure: fraudulent bots to push lies.
More fake humans exist on Facebook than real. 12.3 billion fake Facebook profiles have been removed in two years (2021-2022). See statistics from quaterly Facebook reports [1]. That puts the "largest population on earth" Zuck quotes in another light. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1013474/facebook-fake-ac...
"Governments and companies should have open lines of communication on difficult issues."
Sure, but you're forgetting the public; they should also have access to this communication (or at least most of it).
Maybe it's interesting and can tell us something, but it's not going to be objective and sometimes not even true.
Edit: Consider this message deleted. I left the original content intact. The point still stands, even if it doesn't apply to this article.
Ahem, the article is about Governments "harassing" FB employees to get changes in how FB worked wrt content moderation.
I'd delete grandparent, but can no longer do so.
I still can't understand "implicit jawboning," though. That seems oxymoronic.
The article, however, does seem to be trying to redefine the meaning (Cambridge: "to talk to someone, especially to try to persuade them to do something", Merriam-Webster: "to speak forcefully and persuasively (to)")
That seems like a claim of a very clear first amendment violation. Doesn't it?
Those describing Taibbi's reporting on twitter documents involving govt. officials doing just this sort of thing as a "nothingburger" look increasingly craven.
Please understand, democracy is still in the making.
In order for a democracy to work, enough people need to get on a basic level of education, which schools have been succesfully striving and working towards.
The oligarchy stays wealthy and in power by certain means.
People like Zuckerberg and Chan, the Google sisters, Eric Schmidt, Gates, Altman and his crew believe they and their likes should be the new oligarchy because they are younger, smarter, know PHP and HTML and can write scripts in Python. And they are perfectly aware of the fact that all their money on Wall Street will keep the prevailing Power Structures in place.
There never was a New World Order. There never will be.
Democracy and the sharade of jawboning and similar practices are nothing but talking points of people who like to feel superior.
Communism and socialism didn't get to evolve. Capitalism got to rot away. They experiment on and study societies, communities, individuals for soon to be a century and the only thing that keeps whole nations below potential is oligarchies. But that's incredibly important because a) you need to keep as many psychopaths in check as you can and let them run wild from to time to time in a controlled manner and b) because most people, despite higher education, can not think. They believe in what they hear on the news, they believe journalists, they believe politicians, despite proof of the opposite, which is why schools and unis strive so damn succesfully to get as many people on their level as possible. Soviet schools did the same. So did the socialists in Germany.
There's enough to do for everybody and enough resources and ways to get them.
The only thing leadership (and the the top few %) CAN do better, is to finally pay out the working class the dividents they have earned, which they will use to improve everything.
The reason they won't do that is that they reeducated the people using marketing and hollywood to the point where there is no credible evidence that the people will improve anything at all but instead just consume more, without increasing productivity and constructivity. And there is no need for that at all because the people are happy enough with their amounts of consumption as they are.
Those who can and will improve any environmemt can find ways to get what they need and want to increase their productive and constructive contributions. Except for the exceptions, of course, those who need the right tools before they can get shit done properly, but expansion of surveillance in combo with AI is a talent scouting tool already in the making, isn't it?
But calling people cowards because they didn’t buy into bullshit is one way to go, I guess.
1 - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/twitter-files-explai...
The Twitter files were a sham that certain people have badly misinterpreted, intentionally. Sort of like Barr’s memo.
Perhaps you think the first amendment is rubbish, should be abolished and so systemic violations not worth reporting on? You're entitled to that opinion but the story is not nothing whatever your opinion on that. It happened and probably continues.
I doubt the "nothingburger" "Taibbi is Elon PR" "Grift the right" shooting the messenger can hold. Too many Democrat leaning people don't like it when they see the original docs.
Of course most Republicans really do cock an eyebrow when they find out the "disinformation laptop" was table-top wargamed by the fbi with social media companies prior to the suppression and blatant crude censorship of the story when it came out. Literally wargamed a "disinformation laptop." It's now well acknowledged by the Bidens that the laptop has nothing to do with russia, is real and the contents genuine. Lot of people who hate trump and republicans might not like that much.
It's worth reading in the original and worth checking your pulse if you just swap out Republican for every Democrat and vice versa. Shouldn't matter but partisan loyalty & loathing seems to be a really good cover for appalling crappy behaviour nowadays.
https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/the-censorship-industria...
You're still allowed to hate the "Insane Clown President" and Jared, Ivanka and all the crooked cronies. That's completely allowed. Just imagine if Ivanka got paid by Ukranian oligarchs! Laptop full of skeletons censored. How would you feel about it? You'd think that's fine? Well not me.
Zero quotes from Taibbi's article. Zero accurate paraphrasing of any Taibbi argument or claim. Zero claim of factual error with details. Zero links to the original. Zero mention of Shellenberger or /any/ of the other journalists involved. Just so appallingly bad!
It's like Aunt June reporting to you what her sewing circle thinks about what they say is being said in Shelbyville and why they are so wrong to hate Jebediah Springfield.
How did you go reading just /one/ of the original articles with its source docs? Did you try it? Did /you/ find a problem in the reporting Taibbi actually /did/ in that article or indeed any other? Did you find it a very different experience reading it to reading about it places like "nymag?" I really did.
And first amendment violations are a story and not nothing.