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Ted Cruz takes Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to task

Jim E
The Political Insider
Tue, 10 Apr 2018 22:47 UTC
Zuckerberg
© AP/Andrew Harnik
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
About. Damn. Time.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz just asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg what millions of Americans have been begging to ask: Does Facebook censor conservatives?

During Zuckerberg's congressional testimony, Cruz brought up reported conservative censorship on Facebook. First Cruz laid the trap, asking Zuckerberg if he thought Facebook was a neutral public forum:


Comment: Transcript of Ted Cruz's questioning (for the full hearing see here):
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TEX): Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Mr. Zuckerberg, does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.

CRUZ: Let me ask the question again. Does Facebook consider itself to be a neutral public forum, and representatives of your company are giving conflicting answers on this? Are you a ...

ZUCKERBERG: Well ...

CRUZ: ... First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, here's how we think about this: I don't believe that - there are certain content that clearly we do not allow, right? Hate speech, terrorist content, nudity, anything that makes people feel unsafe in the community. From that perspective, that's why we generally try to refer to what we do as platform for all ideas ...

CRUZ: Let me try this, because the time is constrained. It's just a simple question. The predicate for Section 230 immunity under the CDA is that you're a neutral public forum. Do you consider yourself a neutral public forum, or are you engaged in political speech, which is your right under the First Amendment.

ZUCKERBERG: Well, senator, our goal is certainly not to engage in political speech. I am not that familiar with the specific legal language of the - the law that you - that you speak to. So I would need to follow up with you on that. I'm just trying to lay out how broadly I think about this.

CRUZ: Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook in May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck.

In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk's page, with 1.2 million Facebook followers, after determining their content and brand were, quote, "unsafe to the community."

To a great many Americans that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. Do you agree with that assessment?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, let me say a few things about this. First, I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook in the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place, and I - this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company, is making sure that we do not have any bias in the work that we do, and I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about. Now ...

CRUZ: Let me - let me ask this question: Are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from Planned Parenthood?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not. But let me just ...

CRUZ: How about moveon.org?

ZUCKERBERG: Sorry.

CRUZ: How about moveon.org?

ZUCKERBERG: I'm not specifically aware of those ...

CRUZ: How about any Democratic candidate for office?

ZUCKERBERG: I'm not specifically aware. I mean, I'm not sure.

CRUZ: In your testimony, you say that you have 15,000 to 20,000 people working on security and content review. Do you know the political orientation of those 15,000 to 20,000 people engaging engaged in content review?

ZUCKERBERG: No, senator. We do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they're joining the company.

CRUZ: So as CEO, have you ever made hiring or firing decisions based on political positions or what candidates they supported?

ZUCKERBERG: No.

CRUZ: Why was Palmer Luckey fired?

ZUCKERBERG: That is a specific personnel matter that seems like it would be inappropriate to speak to here.

CRUZ: You just made a specific representation, that you didn't make decisions based on political views. Is that accurate?

ZUCKERBERG: Well, I can - I can commit that it was not because of a political view.

CRUZ: Do you know, of those 15 to 20,000 people engaged in content review, how many, if any, have ever supported, financially, a Republican candidate for office?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I do not know that.

CRUZ: Your testimony says, "It is not enough that we just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive." It says, "We have to make sure people aren't using their voice to hurt people or spread misinformation. We have a responsibility, not just to build tools, to make sure those tools are used for good."

Mr. Zuckerberg, do you feel it's your responsibility to assess users, whether they are good and positive connections or ones that those 15 to 20,000 people deem unacceptable or deplorable?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, you're asking about me personally?

CRUZ: Facebook.

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I think that there are a number of things that we would all agree are clearly bad. Foreign interference in our elections, terrorism, self-harm. Those are things ...

CRUZ: I'm talking about censorship.

ZUCKERBERG: Well, I - I think that you would probably agree that we should remove terrorist propaganda from the service. So that, I agree. I think it is - is clearly bad activity that we want to get down. And we're generally proud of - of how well we - we do with that.

Now what I can say - and I - and I do want to get this in before the end, here - is that I am - I am very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas. That is a - a very important founding principle of - of what we do.

We're proud of the discourse and the different ideas that people can share on the service, and that is something that, as long as I'm running the company, I'm going to be committed to making sure is the case.

CRUZ: Thank you.

THUNE: Thank you, Senator Cruz.
Yea, sure he is. A slippery eel that one is.

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Eye 2

Craig Murray: Yulia Skripal is clearly under duress

Craig Murray
Craig Murray Blog
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 21:32 UTC
yulia skripal
© Reuters
Only the Russians have allowed us to hear the actual voice of Yulia Skripal, in that recorded conversation with her cousin. So the one thing we know for certain is that, at the very first opportunity she had, she called back to her cousin in Russia to let her know what is going on. If you can recall, until the Russians released that phone call, the British authorities were still telling lies that Sergei was in a coma and Yulia herself in a serious condition.

We do not know how Yulia got to make the call. Having myself been admitted unconscious to hospital on several occasions, each time when I came to I found my mobile phone in my bedside cabinet. Yulia's mobile phone plainly had been removed from her and not returned. Nor had she been given an official one - she specifically told her cousin that she could not call her back on that phone as she had it temporarily. The British government could have given her one to keep on which she could be called back, had they wished to help her.

Comment: Craig Murray's explanation is clear, logical, and most frighteningly, probably correct. The Skripals' fate is precarious.

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Propaganda

Fake News: The weapon of choice for a handful of countries

Grete Mauter
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
Fakenewsdrawing
© Unknown
It goes without saying that recently 'fake news' has become one of the most trending search phrases on the net. Moreover, representatives of Collins English Dictionary have gone as far as to name it official Word of the Year for 2017, and there's a very good reasons for this term to enjoy such popularity. For instance, it was used by American President Donald Trump, who accused leading Western media sources of spreading deceitful reports by describing them as 'fake news'.

The uncontested prevalence of such news could be observed during all the major political campaigns of recent years: presidential election in the US and France, parliamentary elections in Germany, Brexit and Catalan referendums... Perhaps there is no country in this world that escaped fake news as they are being manufactured and distributed via social media on the global scale, as there are whole "troll factories" and even all sorts of government bodies that justify their existence by claiming that they're engaged in a "fight against disinformation".

The Guardian experts tasked with analyzing disinformation campaigns in the online media came to a conclusion fake news is not just a Western problem, as it can be found in the media space of pretty much every corner of the world. In Brazil, for example, since early 2016, the popularity of false news reports has exceeded the coverage enjoyed by the mainstream media. This can be explained by the corruption scandal and the subsequent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. According to the BBC, out of the five most popular (according to the number of reposts) news reports in Brazil, three were false. In India, the main distributor of false reports is the WhatsApp messenger, as The Guardian adds.

Comment: It will be all about what is in the regulatory board's idea of programming (MSM) or deprogramming (Alt. News) to make the determination (for the entire populace) on what is considered 'fake news'.

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Laptop

Facebook has always been one big cash grab

Rich Lowry
New York Post
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 19:18 UTC
Mark Zuckerberg
© Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg
Once again, Mark Zuckerberg is sorry.

The founder of Facebook, who has apologized for privacy breaches throughout much of his company's existence, is back at it, on a much larger stage than ever before.

The proximate cause is the Cambridge Analytica controversy. In violation of Facebook's rules, the Trump-linked political consultancy schemed to get access to the data of 87 million users. This has made Facebook a scapegoat for Trump's victory on par with the Russians and James Comey (at least before the FBI director got fired and became a Trump adversary).

In 2012, Barack Obama's re-election campaign did a less-underhanded version of the same thing as Cambridge. The great chronicler of the Obama digital operation, Sasha Issenberg, wrote of how its " 'targeted sharing' protocols mined an Obama backer's Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade."

Comment: Question is, why is Facebook under the gun now? Or is it simply that they got caught with their pants down? See also: Facebook now busted for handing data on millions of users to Hillary Clinton campaign

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Russian Flag

Foreign mass media infringed on Russian law, pedaled propaganda in election coverage


RT
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:36 UTC
Russian election
© Times of Oman
Russian election headquarters
The Upper House Commission for the Protection of State Sovereignty has registered more than 1,000 incidents of the western mass media meddling in the recent Russian presidential polls. The overall number of negative reports relating to the election was some 55 times bigger than ones with a positive outlook.
"Over the period of our monitoring we have found over 1,000 mass media reports that described elections or mentioned them indirectly, but these were not just informational reports. Foreign mass media have deliberately engaged in propaganda, in Russian and on Russian territory," head of the commission, Senator Andrey Klimov, was quoted as saying Wednesday by TASS.
Most of these reports originated from the US mass media, Klimov noted.
"They [US media] published over a half of the total number of reports, and also mass media from Great Britain, France and Germany. Over the campaign period for one positive report we counted 55 reports or articles that were deeply negative."
Klimov also said that 12 Russian-language outlets belonging to western mass media directly violated Russian law when they released propaganda targeting Russian voters.
"Most of them are organizations that get their funding in the United States, usually through the US State Department as they are parts of the so-called BBG [Broadcasting Board of Governors]."
Western journalists had attempted to sully President Vladimir Putin's reputation, promoted candidates that had the weakest voter support and also slandered the electoral process, according to Klimov.
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Dig

British ambassador to UN makes bizarre comment about Karl Marx at emergency Security Council meeting

Simon Rite
RT
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:47 UTC
Karen Pierce

Yes, that is the British ambassador to the UN, Karen Pierce, and yes, this is what she actually wore yesterday to the highest council meeting on Earth when it is ostensibly on the verge of nuclear Armageddon.
For anyone putting their faith in urbane, sensible diplomats with an unsurpassed knowledge of history to guide the world through the current troubled waters, Britain's current UN representative is unlikely to reassure them.

If language is an essential tool for diplomats to convey information, Karen Pierce conveyed perhaps more than she intended about herself when attempting to evoke Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx to criticise Russia over an alleged chemical attack in Syria.

In an exchange with Russia's envoy Vassily Nebenzia, Pierce used a Lenin quote to criticise Moscow's use of vetoes at the UN, and Nebenzia responded by saying Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin were "frequent visitors" in London.


Comment: Touché!!!

That probably went completely by Pierce's head, but what Nebenzia was alluding to was contemporary British support for radicals.


That's when Pierce hit back with this mind-bender:
"In respect of Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what the country that was founded on many of his precepts is doing in the name of supporting Syria by condoning the use of chemical weapons on Syrian territory."


Comment:
facepalm picard


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Bizarro Earth

France's colonies now suffering from major wave of illegal immigration


Economist
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 09:09 UTC
Protests over illegal migration have brought Mayotte to a standstill

Protests over illegal migration have brought Mayotte to a standstill
MANY Europeans feel their homelands have too many immigrants. In countries like Germany, as many as 15% of the population are foreigners. But on Mayotte, a small French island in the Indian Ocean with a population of 256,500, the share is more than half. Immigration has led to violent protests and a general strike, bringing the island to a standstill since February. Locals have begun rounding up suspected illegal immigrants, and the island is descending into chaos.

"Every night ten boats carrying at least 30 people arrive on our shores," says Mansour Kamardine, Mayotte's deputy in France's National Assembly. "It is absolutely intolerable." Many of those arriving are pregnant women. Every year, 70% of the 10,000 births in the island's sole maternity hospital are to illegal migrants. France's policy of droit du sol (birthright citizenship) means they are entitled to French nationality. French officials are considering making the hospital a non-French territory.

The Comoros islands, including Mayotte, were a single French colony until the 1970s, when the people of Mayotte, known as Mahorais, voted to split off and become a French overseas territory. Political turbulence and poverty in the other three islands, which became the independent Union of the Comoros, have since led thousands to flee to Mayotte. Comorians now make up 42% of Mayotte's population. Some have legal status; many do not.

Comment: France, its colonies, and the other Western nations waging war and preaching libtard values only have themselves to blame:

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Star of David

'What's all the fuss about?' Israel responds to footage of IDF sniper shooting protester


Sputnik
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 13:12 UTC
Israel Sniper video screenshot
© Or Heller
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) responded swiftly after a video emerged Monday of its snipers cheering as one of their number shot an unarmed Palestinian protester. The IDF released their findings in their initial investigation into the event just one day after the video was released.

"The video depicts a short part of the response to a violent riot, which included rock hurling and attempts to sabotage the security fence," the IDF said in a statement, adding that the video is from December 22, 2017, and therefore does not document events connected with the Great Return March, a weeks-long mass demonstration demanding Palestinians' right of return that has been ongoing since March 30.

Comment: It's time to re-examine the moral compass when it's 'no big fuss' to shoot people for 'approaching their fence.'

Further reading:

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Handcuffs

Germany's arrest of Madrid's opponents has a chilling precedent

Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 13:12 UTC
Carles Puigdemont

Carles Puigdemont
The arrest by Germany of Catalonia's exiled former President, Carles Puigdemont, follows on a German tradition of tracking down and imprisoning political opponents of the "regime du jour" in Madrid since the fascist putsch launched by Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1936.

Puigdemont, who had been living in exile in Belgium since being deposed by Spain's right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in October 2017, was arrested on March 25 by police in Schleswig-Holstein. Puigdemont's detention by German police was based on a European arrest warrant issued by Spain, a warrant that had been conveniently ignored by authorities in Finland, where Puigdemont had spoken after traveling to Helsinki from Brussels by automobile; Denmark, where Puigdemont was transiting en route to Belgium; Sweden, via which, Puigdemont transited by ferry to and from Finland; and Belgium. The Spanish arrest warrant was similarly ignored by Denmark, during a previous trip by Puigdemont to Copenhagen, and by Swiss authorities when Puigdemont traveled there to address a conference. The Spanish extradition request for Puigdemont was based on Spanish government draconian charges of "rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds in relation to Catalonia's declaration of independence from Spain following a plebiscite in the region that favored separation from Spain.
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X

German historian posts on Facebook that 'Islam is not part of German history', gets banned

Tyler O'Neil
PJ Media
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
Facebook closeup
© Shutterstock
Last month, Facebook censored a German historian who posted a message about Islam's historic impact on Germany. Facebook banned the historian for 30 days, even though 76 percent of Germans agree that Islam does not "belong to Germany."

Michael Hesemann, a journalist and Vatican historian with an honorary doctorate for his work in uncovering documents from the Armenian Genocide, posted a message that Facebook said did "not correspond to our community standards." The offensive message was an accurate - if overstated - historical statement.

"Islam always plays only one role in the 1700-year-old history of the Christian Occident: the role of the sword of Damocles which hung above us, the threat of barbarism against which one needed to unite and fight," Hesemann wrote, according to NRW Direkt. "In this sense, Islam is not part of German history, but the defense against Islam!"

Comment: To a libtarded organization like Facebook, the truth is dangerous and in need of censorship. If it's not PC, it's not fit to post.

See also:

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