"The Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes made a personal, riveting case for breaking up Facebook in a new essay published in The New York Times today. His argument hinges on the idea that Mark Zuckerberg is a “good, kind person” but one whose “power is unprecedented and un-American” and whose “influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.”"

[theatlantic.com]

"Facebook’s current business model is fundamentally at odds with democracy and basic human rights. A company that claims to bring people together has been poisoned by a maniacal focus on mass collection of user data to satisfy advertisers. Hundreds of millions have had their privacy violated and their trust betrayed.

Enough is enough. Mark Zuckerberg must go. For the longest time we’ve accepted as scripture that Silicon Valley founders had a divine right to lead the most powerful companies ever created. We need to burst this cultish idea. Shareholders realize the problem is at the top. They’re lining up to Vote “No on Zuckerberg” at the upcoming AGM. However, Zuckerberg has structured the company so that he has more voting power than all other shareholders combined. It’s clear we need more than shareholders to make this happen. We need an internet-wide vote of no confidence. Zuckerberg’s resignation would send a message to tech workers, government regulators, advocates, and all who hold Silicon Valley accountable that leadership at these companies is a privilege, not a right.

“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” Zuckerberg quipped at the recent F8 developers conference, forcing a guffaw. The audience was silent. Not even a chuckle. We’re not laughing any more, Mark. And we’re coming for your throne."

[theguardian.com]

"Why does the spread of hate speech matter? Hate speech is a hot-button issue for Facebook users who get upset when they flag a post as offensive but Facebook says it does not violate its rules. On the other hand, Facebook has upset users by mistakenly identifying posts as hate speech and taking them down. For example, Facebook had to apologize to a black activist and author after failing to distinguish between the people spreading hate speech and those condemning it.

How worried is Facebook about the corrosive effect hate speech can have on the Facebook experience? It's working on ways to stem the flood of hate speech. For example, some Facebook users were surprised recently to see “Does this post contain hate speech?” listed under every post in their News Feed. "This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate. A bug caused it to launch publicly. It's been disabled," Facebook said in a statement."

[usatoday.com]

"Looking at the rules as a whole, ProPublica reports that Facebook developed the rules in reaction to specific actors’, such as governments and users, complaints. At one point, the rules were open-ended, including a general rule that said, “‘Take down anything else that makes you feel uncomfortable,’” says Dave Willner, a former Facebook employee, in the ProPublica report. Wilner revised the current rules to make them more rigorous. The result, Teichman says, appears to be patchwork constructed not out of some top-down ethical determination, but rather a list slapped together over time. “Categories get this hodgepodge when they're just the result of being stitched together out of complaints people made,” says Teichman."

[wired.com]

"Revealing the guidelines could at least cut down on confusion about whether hateful content is allowed on Facebook. It isn’t. Though the guidelines also raise the question of whether the Facebook value system it codifies means the social network has an editorial voice that would define it as a media company. That could mean the loss of legal immunity for what its users post. Bickert stuck to a rehearsed line that “We are not creating content and we’re not curating content”. Still, some could certainly say all of Facebook’s content filters amount to a curatorial layer.

But whether Facebook is a media company or a tech company, it’s a highly profitable company. It needs to spend some more of the billions it earns each quarter applying the policies evenly and forcefully around the world."

[techcrunch.com]

"Facebook defines seven types of “attacks” that it considers hate speech: calls for exclusion, calls for violence, calls for segregation, degrading generalization, dismissing, cursing and slurs.

For users who want to contest Facebook’s rulings, the company offers little recourse. Users can provide feedback on decisions they don’t like, but there is no formal appeals process."

[propublica.org]

"Recently two of the elite digital priesthood, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, called for more privacy and regulation of the internet. Zuckerberg also promised that Facebook “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.”

Both calls are brazen, self serving & cynical, and exercises in misdirection. The principles of trust, privacy & ethical behaviour were never high on their agenda as they grew their digital, social & cultural hegemonies. They’ve done little to protect our data-actually, legally speaking it’s their data-and that was the way it was always meant to be. Laws protecting our data have long since been undermined by a labyrinth of online contracts & terms and conditions that nobody reads, and what could be euphemistically called a light-touch regulatory framework."

[counterpunch.org]

After 3 days, almost half the time of the ban itself, I got the ruling from Facebook. It is considered hate speech. They provided their Community Standards link, but with no actual feedback, there's no way of telling what specifically crossed the line.

That is the nature of repressing speech in the public square (corporate owned or not). Not knowing the infraction fosters self-censorship. In this case, the ultimate goal is to dissuade posters from discussing Israel on any negative light.

Imagine discussing politics, and being hesitant to point out that the US commits war crimes. For some in here, that's no big deal because Zuck isn't the government.

With that attitude, expect more of the same. Maybe over issues important to you someday.

The nature of shadow bans and the power of algorithms to control the free flow of information can be quite pernicious, particularly as they quite often operate beneath the surface and below the radar. The ability for government moneyed interests to do this to greater effect and with less accoutability will only increase.

That makes it imperative to discuss the many ramifications now.

:----:

"Murray closed by adding a very brief comment of his own: “There is no room to doubt the evil nature of the expansionist apartheid state that Israel has now become. Nor the moral vacuity of its apologists in the western media.” Since this was, of course, a damning statement about mainstream ‘news’ media in The West, these mainstream ‘news’ media, including Facebook, can be expected to dislike that — and they evidently do.

On April 25th Murray headlined "Blocked By Facebook and the Vulnerability of New Media”, and he reported:

This site’s visitor numbers are currently around one third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause is not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook:

What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you.

Twitter have a similar system known as “shadow banning”. Again it is secretive and the victim is not informed. I do not appear to be shadow banned at the moment, but there has been an extremely sharp drop – by a factor of ten – in the impressions my tweets are generating."

[russia-insider.com]

watched 2 or 3 of his episodes & got the impression that everything was pretty well staged.
a prominent jewish canadian writer, Mordecia Richler, wrote a scathing article about the mistreatment of the palestinians after a visit there & was promptly condemned by the montreal jewish community.

Loudly... and often.

Here a piece where the writer claims Baron Cohen is too hard on Israel, that they're not like that anymore.

:-----:

"My wife and I were young Israeli volunteers in a small North American Jewish community. One day, we got an invitation to a lecture by a retired Israeli military officer. He was in America trying to boost Israel’s image. And his tools were his thick Israeli accent, his brash manner, and his captivatingly dry observations. “You know,” the retired lieutenant colonel told his crowd of mostly elderly Canadian Jews, “we could throw all the Arabs into the Jordan. But the world won’t let.” I assume he meant Jordan the country, not Jordan the river, but who knows."

[nytimes.com]

One of the things I often find disheartening about many humanists/atheists/agnostics is their seeming inability to look at Israeli Zionist crimes in a fair and rational manner. I feel part of this stems from the perception that Arab/Muslim cultures are hopelessly backward and that Israeli Jews embrace modernity in a somewhat familiar way and that their religionism is somehow less threatening.

For myself, the religionism issue is the first thing to set aside. This is about what was done to indigenous people by colonizers. I don't need to assess the merits of competing godviews to see that the colonizers' theft and plunder of the Americas was wrong. The same holds true for Zionist land theft. Their holy books are not real estate deeeds from their god.

To maintain such would make you as ridiculous as the Republican atheists in here, ignoring the overreaching religiosity and fake piety of the GOP, mostly because they're willing to demonize Muslims/Arabs/Palestinians and support Israel.

You go Sasha!

Re: Baron Cohen's Zionism.

:-----:

"There is one descriptor that is too infrequently applied to him: Zionist shill. Plenty of writers have noted Baron Cohen’s ardent Zionism, but few have suggested that his Zionism should cast him in a negative light (“Before ‘The Dictator’ and ‘Borat’, friends recall, Sacha Baron Cohen was a very nerdy, very funny, Israel-oriented guy,” The Times of Israel, 11 May 2012). Even fewer have examined how that Zionism visibly influences his thematic choices and public role-playing.

His commitment to Zionism is troublesome for numerous reasons: it supports the historical and current dispossession of Palestinians, situates him as an advocate of militaristic state power, calls into question his ethical commitments, and places him in Hollywood’s safest political space, that of fealty to Israel, a space in which the title of maverick loses all significant meaning."

[electronicintifada.net]