I tend to not follow a lot of the horror stories about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s conservative-nihilist-anarchist leanings. I’ve never had a Facebook page and I never will. It seems like an utter horror show and I hope more people opt out of it ahead of the 2020 election, on ALL sides. Mark Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk to the House Financial Services Committee about Libra, the new crypto-currency. But Zuck’s appearance become a whole other thing entirely, as House members (mostly Democrats) used their time to ask him very pointed questions about political advertising on Facebook and more. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got in some of the deepest cuts:
I love AOC’s what-ifs. What if she ran Facebook ads claiming that Republicans supported the Green New Deal? What if Republicans ran ads targeting black neighborhoods with the wrong election date? What if Zuckerberg acted like an actual media publisher with editorial and moral responsibilities? What if he wants white supremacists to “fact check” Facebook? And few people are talking about Zuck’s hemming and hawing over his knowledge of Cambridge Analytica as well – that was fascinating. Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg is telling the truth about ANYTHING here?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
It was beautiful. She is an absolute artist at cutting through the bull shit.
She is amazing rightly crediting her staff for providing her with the information she needs to prepare for these hearings. She possesses great poise but remains well aware and acknowledges that she wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the work put in by her staff. She is saavy and has crafted and leads a great team. I really admire that she acknowledges their contributions.
Exactly!!!!
I love her.
So true.
He’s used to being grilled by or or lectured to by old, out of touch Congresspeople who are clueless about social media. AOC is his generation and is tech/social media savvy and he couldn’t use his usual arsenal of word salads or doublespeak to talk around or not answer the questions.
He lied about inventing and plagarized Facebook anyway so why not continue with the same character.
During and after the 2016 election I stopped going on FB that often. I had to unfriend so many people who were showing their true colors. People were regularly sharing inaccurate information. It’s so out of control MZ has always been a narcissistic POS.
correction: he is worse than narcissistic. he is messianic.
She is honestly one of my heroes.
🙂
Ladies and gentlemen, the 2028 President of the United States of America!!
HELL YEAH!!!
I invite you to visit San Francisco to see what the country would be like under her leadership
More like what it is like under Zuck’s leadership. I used to live there. The techbros have ruined it. They’ve ruined the internet, too. It’s quite unfortunate.
Ah San Francisco! Rows of pastel colored Victorian houses winding their way up and down hills, views of the bay and the ocean, moderate temperatures all year long, museums, theaters, and concert halls, Italian and Chinese restaurants, public transportation, Golden Gate Park and the Presidio and Fisherman’s Wharf and Coit Tower and the Ferry Building. Nobody with any sense would ever want to live there, I wonder why housing is so expensive.
Lord knows that San Francisco isn’t perfect, but it’s damn beloved by many, many people. As for the homeless population here, many people come from all over the United States to California because the states that they live in don’t offer services to them. A hospital in Nevada was sending its homeless to SF with one-way bus tickets and had to be sued by the City to stop it.
It’s so frustrating when people like you say stuff like this. You may not like it, but plenty of people love SF, and the new wave of Fox lovers love to hate SF because of Nancy Pelosi, and they want to blame her for the homeless problem, and people like AOC by extension. So, yes, please invite people to SF so that they can learn about why the homeless population here is so big, and about how so many wealthy Democrats and Republicans move here. So many of the wealthy live here now that they are driving up prices for middle and lower income people. Job rich places have issues with managing housing and services. Success brings challenges.
You mean the city with the most expensive real estate in the country because damn near everyone wants to move here? By all means, please continue to call it a cesspool on the internet, maybe it will get a little cheaper and less crowded around here 😀
She was so on point! You can tell he is lying, and is also low-key furious to be put in his place by a woman.
Was he mad? That’s good, the douche deserves it.
I haven’t had Facebook in over six years and I do not miss it AT ALL.
Yeah me either. Dropped it maybe seven years ago? Probably longer. I usually quit doing something once everyone and everything tells me to do it lol.
Neither do I. I wish people could notice that Facebook is totally irrelevant.
I am soooooo much happier since getting rid of FB. I really don’t need to keep up with people from my past lives, and my Trump supporting family members can call or text (they don’t).
I was forced to get a fb page because of family members that wanted to “keep in touch”. Funny thing is NONE of them keep in touch with me. I think they thought I’d post personal sh*t on there for them to gossip about. LOL jokes on them. Honestly though, I come from a pretty pathetic family who doesn’t call and will instead post on fb when a family member dies, gets married or has a kid. It’s embarrassing and I hate this is how the world is now…or maybe it’s just my relatives.
Fyi, he owns Instagram too. So if we y’all really don’t want to support him, you gotta hat rid of your gram.
And WhatsApp
I quit Insta fairly soon after I signed up several years ago. I was fiddling around with settings, notifications and privacy I think, and the app was being obscure and difficult so I said fine. I’m out lol.
There’s another vid being shared about Zuck being compared to Dump. The most hilarious part of it was the (R) Congressman used it as a mini platform to build up Dumpster as being a successful billionaire on the cutting edge… just like Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg barely cracked a smile, but man, I wish that congressman dude would have been guffawed mute by the incredulity of that fawning nauseating display of sycophancy.
The times we live in…🙄
Bravo! This is how you speak truth to power.
Oh, look…it’s the frat boy güero who tossed some chump change (1.2 million scraped up from his couch cushions by the maid) at teachers… such a marvelous guy, this frat güero.
That clunking noise you just heard? That would be my eyes rolling out of my head and falling onto the floor.
Walk him like a dog, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes. Like a DOG.
Frieda, from your mouth to gawd’s ear.
We are very lucky to have AOC in our government!
she can get under my skin sometimes, but she really and truly shines when she is able to question people in this setting. every single time I’m so impressed by her clear line of thinking and questioning. it makes it easy for pretty much anyone to follow what the issue is. this was beautiful and cutting. Zuckerberg looked like a damn fool and he knew it.
i agree here. I think she has a propensity to act like a high schooler and in general I get annoyed by people who havent earned their stripes pretending that they know everything (her going up against Pelosi comes to mind), but she really shines in these type of settings and is able to catch people really flat footed. he looked like an idiot.
Zuckerberg is a malevolent shitgibbon thief who can’t code.
is that the new virgin who can’t drive?
I totally heard the Brittany Murphy voice when I read your comment!
LOL. Yes! That is exactly what I was thinking of….
Yessssssss!!!
😂 😂 😂 😂
(Bonus points for “shitgibbon.” That might be my new favorite insult. Even over “asshat!”)
Zuckerberg doesn’t have any true political leaning beyond getting paid. He’ll never hold the platform to any standard higher than the lowest common denominator because it makes him rich. I stopped using Facebook years ago and haven’t looked back.
He couldn’t answer a SINGLE one of her questions clearly and coherently. She whooped him.
It’s a difficult position to be in. I understand in theory where he’s coming from. The problem is a lot bigger than Zuck though. Laws and regulations have not updated anywhere near as fast as they have needed to be updated. The internet is growing and changing SO fast, and it’s like all the people in power … just didn’t expect it.
Which is silly, but at the same time, it’s such a prevalent part of our lives now, and because ANYONE can build a website, run a blog, purchase ads, or whatever it’s something that’s going to be difficult to handle properly across the board. Facebook is a business. They rely on ad revenue. I understand WHY they don’t want to be seen as censoring, but there needs to be a balance, and there needs to be more checks in place.
A major problem is that a lot of the people in charge of working on these specific types of laws (as far as local and federal governments go) aren’t typically the people that understand it or the culture surrounding it.
And when you add things like automatic filtering algorythms to the mix, you end up with a mixed bag of results. False positives definitely happen, and reporting things like copyright infringement is easily abused. And you have things like article 13 in Europe where there’s SO much that’s unclear in it’s guidelines – this is a quote about article 12a:
“Article 12a might stop anyone who isn’t the official organiser of a sports match from posting any videos or photos of that match. This could put a stop to viral sports GIFs and might even stop people who attended matches from posting photos to social media. But as with the articles above, all of this depends on how the directive is interpreted by member states when they make it into national law.”
There’s just so much left to interpretation when it comes to regulating tech companies and the internet as a whole, and things have kind of just run amok for so long at this point that I really don’t know what they’re going to do when it comes to things like the facebook ads or even just regulating what you can post on your social media or blogs.
Facebook should be treated like any other publishing company, which is what they are. They are a publishing company. They publish peoples’ content. What bothers me is that there ARE so many things they could do to address their problems, but they CHOOSE not to. Look at little Pinterest. Pinterest is the smallest of the social media companies, for sure. But they made it impossible to search for anti-vaxx stuff on their platform. If you’ve already pinned it, you can see it. But no one else will be able to find it. Just like that, anti-vaxx disinformation was effectively hidden and shut down on the platform. Facebook could do the same damn thing, tomorrow. They choose not to.
Facebook could pay to have employees in countries across the world, like in Myanmar where Facebook is literally being used to incite violence. The United Nations literally said that Facebook is “enabling ethnic cleansing” and over nine thousand people are dead, over forty thousand people missing and presumed dead. Having folks on the ground, dedicated to just monitoring content in that country, could have prevented some of those deaths. Employing a couple folks in Myanmar to keep a closer eye on just the material on the website relating to ethnic cleansing…Facebook could afford to do that, that’s lunch money to them to employ a team over there. They choose not to.
They make their advertising tools available to bad actors, as we have seen. They could *not do that*. They could vet the companies and people who buy ads. They choose not to.
Facebook chronically refuses to take any accountability for the consequences of its choices. It’s that whole Silicon-Valley-libertarianism thing. They aren’t going to do the things they should. The government will have to crack down on them much harder, or there will be other Myanmar situations and more innocent people dying.
🙌👏
“Congresswoman,…”
“Uh, Congresswoman,…”
He’s gross.
There’s been a lot of coverage of AOC on this hearing, but Katie Porter and Maxine Waters and Ayana Presley were amazing also.
Yeah I love watching Katie Porter work her magic too
Seriously! Katie was my absolute favorite, but Rashida Tlaib nailed it, too.
Have you seen Joyce Beatty questioning him? She’s amazing, doesn’t leave him any wiggle room and shows that even though he seems like a young boy who just wants to do right he is a powerful man who should be more informed, more prepared and more respectful.
To quote her:
“Maybe you just don’t read a lot of things that have to do with civil rights, or African Americans,” Beatty said. “I have a lot of questions that I’m going to send to you that I’m not going to be able to get through, and I would like an answer — because this is appalling and disgusting to me.”
Why would anyone rely on Facebook as their source for news?
because it they use it to reinforce what they want to believe
True story: an old neighbor of mine (in her 80s) posted that heinous meme that alleges it’s a photo of a Congresswoman (Ihan Omar) being trained by Al Qaeda. I pointed out that the meme has been debunked withe links that show the picture was an AP photo of a woman with US backed Somali military that was taken in 1978. I also pointed out that Omar wasn’t born until 1982 & that Al Qaeda was formed in 1990 – many of her friends have shared her post without correction. Her reaction was to delete my comments and leave the meme. I should also note that when I saw what she did, I was a right bitch and added a new comment calling her out for deleting the correction while leaving the lie up to be shared (I also reported the post as fake news but FB won’t do anything about it). Since she’s a “good Catholic” I was going to include a comment about how bearing false witness is on G-d’s top ten list but didn’t)
I’m glad my parents aren’t around to see how many of their old friends from our old neighborhood are, for all intents & purposes, Nazi sympathizers
I was just going to say that. Do we really need government regulation here? If people are too stupid to use FB as a source of information no regulation can help them.
Y’all should check out the Behind the Bastards episode on Zuckerberg. You think his irresponsibility here is bad– what Facebook has done in the Philippinnes and Myanmar is fucking terrifying. And as for taking down ads that pose imminent physical danger– there was an ad that an independent organization flagged because it clearly incited racial violence and Facebook refused to even flag it.
AOC was great, but I have to give hats off to Katie Porter too — she is another one who comes prepared and always sends these miserable sops back with their tails between their legs. I loved it when she grilled Jamie Dimon of Chase–she had him on the ropes the whole time. Women will save this country from the crap that we see now. Pelosi, Waters, Porter, AOC, Warren, . . .lord knows the men aren’t gonna do it.
I loved Ms Porter and her comments to Jamie Dimon, it was awesome!
I think he created a simple website in college that took on a life of its own, and now he’s way out of his depth. He’s a figurehead but I’d bet somebody else is running the show at HQ.
I love how thoughtful and measured her questions are. She’s just brilliant 🙂
He’s a POS. I’ll be shutting down FB next year. I paid for some networking group that only uses FB to disseminate, once I’m done I’m out. MZ has zero intention of being a decent person and doing the right thing. No amount of money is enough for him. This wanna be neo colonialist buying 100 acres of indigenous land in Hawaii can eat sh*t.
I know so many “progressive” peers who just can’t let go of Facebook. “But the groups!” “But my business!” “But my family members!” I’m like, “BUT DEMOCRACY!!” Everyone has to stop making excuses and stop using it or the problems will never go away. Anyone who uses FB is complicit, in my opinion.
My son who is 31, has no idea how much privacy he has lost out on. He can be tracked anywhere through his phone now, he’s been on Facebook for years, and he can be contacted through a damn video game now. (lol, I sound old) It makes me sad for him and his friends.
I couldn’t bring myself to entirely delete my account just yet, but I did deactivate it. I find it easier to stick to social media sites that don’t require me to reveal so much of my real identity. It’s such a bad idea on many levels.
Well he was in the right place at the right time. He was fast enough to get ahead and launch a social media site that connected people. Beyond that he seems like pretty ignorant opportunistic piece of paper who will go in whatever direction the wind is blowing. Judging from his testimonies he seems time not a very bright person.
She is brilliant! Love her and how she nails him to the wall. I don’t know who told him he has a good haircut, but they lied to him.
I kno! He looks like Julius Caesar!
There is an old rumor in the tech community that before he married Melissa, every time Bill Gates had to give a presentation his assistant would schedule him for a haircut right before, so they could ensure his hair would be washed. When MSFT really started taking off, his hair did get shorter, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ could be same, tho!
This is awesome.
Zukerberg has the “soul” of C. Montgomery Burns. He’s evil.
His ears get redder and redder as he tries to lie his way through question after question