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September 27, 2021
The FaceBook Files: Wall Street Journal Expose Proves FaceBook Has Been Lying About Treating Users Equally, and Has Long Known Its Product Instagram Is "Toxic" for Teenaged GirlsThis was a three-part series released last week, linked by Real Clear Investigations. If you've ever wondered how Joy Ann Reid never gets censored or "limited" no matter how much anti-vaccination conspiracy theorizing she engages in -- I mean, engaged in, prior to Joe Biden becoming, supposedly, "President" -- well, maybe Twitter has a "whitelist" similar to the one FaceBook employs to protect its favorites. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. Of course, this internal review was stamped "attorney-client privilege" so that it could never be subpoenaed by Congress or a court. But it got leaked. "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly," said the confidential review. It called the company's actions "a breach of trust” and added: "Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences." XCheck started out as a program that would immunize VIPs from automated moderation, shunting their posts up to to human beings who will moderate them. But, in fact, FaceBook only reviews 10% at most of XCheck users' posts. They have decided that it's easier to just not review them at all, meaning that FaceBook's powerful, politically-favored VIPs are effectively "whitelisted" and will never be censored or punished, no matter what they write.
While the program included most government officials, it didn't include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism. The fake Oversight Board made 19 recommendations to FaceBook. FaceBook said they'd adopt 15 of them. One of the four they refused to adopt concerned being transparent about its XCheck whitelisting program for VIPs. Furthermore, FaceBook actually misled the Oversight Board about XCheck, making the Oversight Board's blessing of FaceBook worthless. The XCheck documents show that Facebook misled the Oversight Board, said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University. The board was funded with an initial $130 million commitment from Facebook in 2019, and Ms. Klonick was given special access by the company to study the group's formation and its processes. I don't know. Why would CBS set up an "independent investigation" of RatherGate which then whitewashed the affair and claimed CBS was blameless and Dan Rather just committed a minor boo-boo? Why would The Lincoln Project fund an "independent" review by lawyers they were paying which then claimed there was no evidence the Lincoln Project knew that it was harboring a serial sex predator and groomer of underage boys, despite their being publicly-available evidence they did know? Gee, if I can't trust sham "independent reviews" bought and paid for by crooked corporations to deliver a "not guilty" verdict on demand, who can I trust? ... So the "Oversight Board" has repeatedly sent toothless Strongly Worded Letters and FaceBook has told them to pound sand. Maybe they should change the name from "Oversight Board" to "Unsolicited, Unwanted Suggestions Board." FaceBook has repeatedly lied to the public and to the supposedly-independent "Oversight Board" which will supposedly police its actions about XCheck. FaceBook has claimed it affects a "small amount" of users; in fact, at least 5.8 million users have been granted a carte blanche to violate FaceBook's supposed "rules" as they will. Pitch for National Review: The Conservative Case for Repeatedly Lying to Congress and Federal Agencies Instagram's own internal research established that Instagram causes a fair number of girls to want to kill themselves: "Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook's internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves." 40% of Instagram's users are 22 and younger, and FaceBook intends to get more and more teens (and tweens) to sign up for Instagram. ... I bet you they've stamped that research "attorney-client material," too. Note that the documents reveal that Zuckerberg had been personally briefed about some of this research. But look at how Zuckerberg answered the question if his company had studied the effect of its products on children: The research has been reviewed by top Facebook executives, and was cited in a 2020 presentation given to Mr. Zuckerberg, according to the documents. At a congressional hearing this March, Mr. Zuckerberg defended the company against criticism from lawmakers about plans to create a new Instagram product for children under 13. When asked if the company had studied the app's effects on children, he said, "I believe the answer is yes." He believes -- but only believes, Senator -- that the company has done research on Instagram's effects on children. I guess he forgot getting personally briefed on this research. Congress has asked for its research in this area -- guess what Zuckerberg told Congress? In August, Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn in a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg called on him to release Facebook's internal research on the impact of its platforms on youth mental health. Yeah I'm sure that's why. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company welcomed productive collaboration with Congress and would look for opportunities to work with external researchers on credible studies. Yeah I'm sure of that, too. This point is about FaceBook -- and Twitter, for that matter -- living and dying according to "engagement." About how to make their sites "sticky." About how to keep their users addicted. And you almost certainly know what drives "engagement" on social media -- what is that keeps people refreshing and refreshing. Anger. Outrage. Controversy. Arguing with other people. Screaming, digitally, at other people. This is the big reason I end every day with a Cafe post. I've been thinking of doing one in the middle of the day, too. Politics is too emotionally draining. Well, emotionally stimulating (in the bad ways), and then emotionally draining. Especially now, in the last days of America. But I realized that the news was just too upsetting for people's mental and emotional health without having to commission studies about it. FaceBook did commission studies. And they realized that their unholy "algorithm" was driving "content creators" to feed the algorithm with hate, conflict, and yes, even racism. But they also realized that that conflict was good for their bottom line. So they kept the algorithm pumping. In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it. Users were turning off FaceBook -- it had become a social media site for grandparents to keep up with their grandchildren. That's nice and all, but that wasn't good for FaceBook's profits. So they changed the algorithm to reward the sharing of rage-stoking information. Data scientists on that integrity team--whose job is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform--worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company's other objective--making users engage more with Facebook. By the way, I begin to see why FaceBook is so aggressively censorious of conservatives: They want the sharing of outrage political clickbait. They want the "engagement" that produces. But they also want to be seen as "trying to fix the problem." And how do they do that? By cracking down on one and only side of the political aisle. Leftists can continue sharing outrage porn with each other, and bombing their conservative friends and family with it. But when a conservative argues back, or shares his own articles to refute the leftist ones -- shadowbanned. "Limited." Banned from running ads. FaceBook changed the algorithm to reward supposedly "Meaningful Social Interaction" (spoiler: there is very little meaningful social interaction on FaceBook) because the former staple of FaceBook "interaction" -- original posts by people sharing wedding pictures or the like -- were declining precipitously. Thus, the algorithm was reworked so that posts that racked up reposts or responses (often angry) would literally get points for every like or repost or reaction. And the more points a post "earned," the more widely it would be spread. You know what can really rack up a lot of "Meaningful Social Interaction" points in a hurry? Articles explaining why white people are terrible and have fundamentally evil DNA. Those'll get lots of points!
From a business perspective, it worked. As Facebook predicted, time spent on the platform declined, but the effort to maximize interactions between users slowed the free fall in comments, and mostly improved the all-important metric of "daily active people" using Facebook, according to tests run in August 2018, internal memos show. That's what I said earlier -- FaceBook kept the divisive messaging from the left -- that really drives up those MSI scores -- but, to placate critics (especially those in the Democrat Party, which is always threatening to take action against this Tolerated Illegal Monopoly), they clamped down on anything they considered "divisive" from the right. | Recent Comments
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Before Nightfall A Corpse Was All That Was Left Of The ONT
Flight of the Canards Cafe Is "Havana Syndrome" Real? "Brokenism:" The Main Political Battle of Our Time Study: The New York Times Stoked Fear Over Covid Plus: GAINZZZ Reminder: As the Election Approaches, Politicians Are Falling Over Themselves to Brand Themselves as Bigots and Secretly Implement Racist Policies The NY Times is Whining About Memes Again. That's a Good Sign. The Last Time the Drearily Pious Atheists Were This Exercised About Memes Was 2016. Former Clinton Advisor Mark Penn: ABC "News" Should Submit to a Full Third-Party Investigation to Determine If They Schemed to Fact-Check Only Trump The New Yorker Refuse to Correct Russian Misinformation, Still Claiming That Kamala Harris Never Endorsed Using US Taxpayer Money to Pay for Sex Changes for Illegal Alien Teenagers THE MORNING RANT: Harvard Launches “Introductory” Math Course for its Students Who Can’t Do 9th Grade Math Search
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