Are you bothered by fake news, systematic misinformation campaigns and Facebook “dark posts” — micro-targeted ads not visible to the public — aimed at African-Americans to discourage them from voting? You must be one of those people “upset about ideas” you disagree with.
Are you troubled when agents of a foreign power pose online as American Muslims and post incendiary content that right-wing commentators can cite as evidence that all American Muslims are sympathizers of terrorist groups like the Islamic State? Sounds like you can’t handle a healthy debate.
Does it bother you that Russian actors bought advertisements aimed at swing states to sow political discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, and that it took eight months after the election to uncover any of this? Well, the marketplace of ideas isn’t for everyone.
.. bias in the digital sphere is structurally different from that in mass media, and a lot more complicated than what programmers believe.
.. what matters most is not the political beliefs of the employees but the structures, algorithms and incentives they set up, as well as what oversight, if any, they employ to guard against deception, misinformation and illegitimate meddling.
.. by design, business model and algorithm, Facebook has made it easy for it to be weaponized to spread misinformation and fraudulent content.
.. this business model is also lucrative, especially during elections. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, called the 2016 election “a big deal in terms of ad spend” for the company
.. Facebook responds to such pressure as much of the traditional media do: by caving and hiding behind flimsy “there are two sides to everything” arguments.
.. Even the conservative pundit and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, of all people, has expressed befuddlement at the charge that Facebook censored conservative content.
.. He has correctly pointed out that Facebook had been a boon for right-wing groups, especially of the alt-right and Breitbart variety
U.S. Far-Right Activists Promote Hacking Attack Against Macron
“Intervening in the final hour of the official campaign, this operation is clearly a matter of democratic destabilization, as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” Mr. Macron’s campaign said in a statement late Friday, minutes before the communications prohibition went into effect.
.. By Saturday, a trail of digital crumbs appeared to tie the attack on Mr. Macron’s campaign to Russian hackers. Forensics specialists found that one of the leaked Excel documents from Mr. Macron’s campaign had been modified on a Russian version of Excel, and edited on Russian-language computers.
One document had last been modified by a Russian user named Roshka Georgiy Petrovich. Mr. Petrovich, 32, an employee of the Moscow-based Eureka CJSC, a Russian technology company, did not immediately return emails requesting comment. Eureka CJSC’s clients include several Russian government agencies
.. A week before the second round of the French election, for instance, online activists, many from the United States and other English-speaking countries, flooded Twitter with coordinated anti-Macron memes — online satirical photos with often biting captions — carrying hashtags like #elysee2017 that were linked to the campaign. That included portraying him as a 21st-century equivalent of Marie Antoinette, the out-of-touch last queen of France, and other memes made allegations of an extramarital affair.
“They tried to bombard French Twitter with memes favorable to Le Pen,”
.. posted what were said to be copies of documents showing that Mr. Macron had supposedly set up a bank account in the Bahamas to avoid paying taxes. He denied the allegations.
Ms. Le Pen referred to such an overseas bank account during the vicious debate, leading to a bitter rebuttal by Mr. Macron’s team and an official investigation into the spread of the rumors.
.. Yet in a sign of how the far right outside the country is trying to foment the discussion, many of the Twitter posts about the hacking have originated in the United States, according to Trendsmap, a data analytics tool. About half of the social media messages around political hashtags linked to the breach have been written in English
.. “Misinformation is increasingly used to achieve political ends,” Mr. Sarts said. “Technology helps to amplify that message through fake news sites and social media.”
Bill O’Reilly’s political legacy
The most-watched presenter in cable news was forced out of Fox News on April 19th
Mr O’Reilly was television’s most successful purveyor of fake news long before there was a name for it.
.. But his enduring political legacy, shared with Mr Ailes, will be the corrosion of public discourse in America. In 2004 Media Matters for America, an activist group, awarded Mr O’Reilly its inaugural “Misinformer of the Year” award (for which he beat out fellow Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity). In 2005 Stephen Colbert, a comedian, created a show for “Comedy Central” based almost entirely on Mr O’Reilly’s
.. calling “Black Lives Matter”, the activist movement against police killings of black Americans, a “hate America group”, or accusing the left of trying to use immigration to destroy “traditional America”—reached a sympathetic audience of several million, mostly white, mostly older Americans.
Rex Tillerson Supposedly Shifted Exxon Mobil’s Climate Position. Except He Really Didn’t.
“Tillerson’s own views about climate science were not greatly different from Lee Raymond’s,” though Tillerson “did not claim or wish to project the same sort of independent scientific expertise that Raymond had offered about climate science.” But Tillerson did see that the company needed to reposition itself.
.. Its 2007 Corporate Citizenship report announced that the company would “discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
.. Tillerson “brought a more clever approach, a more PR-savvy approach, to climate at Exxon, but the company really didn’t change its stripes much,” said Kert Davies, who leads the Climate Investigations Center and was the creator of ExxonSecrets
.. In June 2009, the House passed a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions. But that legislation failed to gain traction in the Senate. Exxon undertook an aggressive lobbying campaign that year, spending $27.4 million ― more than the entire environmental lobby combined, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The American Petroleum Institute ― of which Exxon Mobil is a member ― launched its own PR campaign against the legislation.
.. he said publicly he preferred a tax on carbon ― a policy that was not under debate in Congress at the time, but was also politically implausible at best, considering it was in the middle of the Great Recession... Supporting a carbon tax wasn’t necessarily a cynical ploy to undermine the cap-and-trade bill; there are practical reasons a company like Exxon would support of a carbon tax. A handful of fossil-fuel companies already assign a price to carbon emissions for their internal accounting, including Exxon. As more countries take steps to cut carbon emissions as part of the Paris agreement, Exxon has said it prefers a predictable tax on carbon to a cap-and-trade system that is open to market fluctuations.
.. And unlike many of its industry rivals, Exxon has failed to invest seriously in renewable energy.. Tillerson has openly mocked the clean-energy industry for years, joking once that he wasn’t “really against renewables” because wind turbine operators bought Exxon’s oil as a lubricant. “The more windmills are built, the more oil we sell,”.. the company funded a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign.
..It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the world’s largest oil company is good at greenwashing ― they spend more money on it than they do on renewable energy development.”