social-media-misinformation

No More Apologies: Inside Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, has signed off on an effort to show users pro-Facebook stories and to distance himself from scandals.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, signed off last month on a new initiative code-named Project Amplify.

The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network.

The idea was that pushing pro-Facebook news items — some of them written by the company — would improve its image in the eyes of its users, three people with knowledge of the effort said. But the move was sensitive because Facebook had not previously positioned the News Feed as a place where it burnished its own reputation. Several executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal, one attendee said.

Project Amplify punctuated a series of decisions that Facebook has made this year to aggressively reshape its image. Since that January meeting, the company has begun a multipronged effort to change its narrative by distancing Mr. Zuckerberg from scandals, reducing outsiders’ access to internal data, burying a potentially negative report about its content and increasing its own advertising to showcase its brand.

The moves amount to a broad shift in strategy. For years, Facebook confronted crisis after crisis over privacy, misinformation and hate speech on its platform by publicly apologizing. Mr. Zuckerberg personally took responsibility for Russian interference on the site during the 2016 presidential election and has loudly stood up for free speech online. Facebook also promised transparency into the way that it operated.

But the drumbeat of criticism on issues as varied as racist speech and vaccine misinformation has not relented. Disgruntled Facebook employees have added to the furor by speaking out against their employer and leaking internal documents. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published articles based on such documents that showed Facebook knew about many of the harms it was causing.

So Facebook executives, concluding that their methods had done little to quell criticism or win supporters, decided early this year to go on the offensive, said six current and former employees, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal.

“They’re realizing that no one else is going to come to their defense, so they need to do it and say it themselves,” said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook public policy director.

The changes have involved Facebook executives from its marketing, communications, policy and integrity teams. Alex Schultz, a 14-year company veteran who was named chief marketing officer last year, has also been influential in the image reshaping effort, said five people who worked with him. But at least one of the decisions was driven by Mr. Zuckerberg, and all were approved by him, three of the people said.

Credit…Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, denied that the company had changed its approach.

“People deserve to know the steps we’re taking to address the different issues facing our company — and we’re going to share those steps widely,” he said in a statement.

For years, Facebook executives have chafed at how their company appeared to receive more scrutiny than Google and Twitter, said current and former employees. They attributed that attention to Facebook’s leaving itself more exposed with its apologies and providing access to internal data, the people said.

So in January, executives held a virtual meeting and broached the idea of a more aggressive defense, one attendee said. The group discussed using the News Feed to promote positive news about the company, as well as running ads that linked to favorable articles about Facebook. They also debated how to define a pro-Facebook story, two participants said.

That same month, the communications team discussed ways for executives to be less conciliatory when responding to crises and decided there would be less apologizing, said two people with knowledge of the plan.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had become intertwined with policy issues including the 2020 election, also wanted to recast himself as an innovator, the people said. In January, the communications team circulated a document with a strategy for distancing Mr. Zuckerberg from scandals, partly by focusing his Facebook posts and media appearances on new products, they said.

The Information, a tech news site, previously reported on the document.

The impact was immediate. On Jan. 11, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer — and not Mr. Zuckerberg — told Reuters that the storming of the U.S. Capitol a week earlier had little to do with Facebook. In July, when President Biden said the social network was “killing people” by spreading Covid-19 misinformation, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, disputed the characterization in a blog post and pointed out that the White House had missed its coronavirus vaccination goals.

“Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Mr. Rosen wrote.

Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts soon changed. Rather than addressing corporate controversies, Mr. Zuckerberg’s posts have recently featured a video of himself riding an electric surfboard with an American flag and messages about new virtual reality and hardware devices.

Facebook also started cutting back the availability of data that allowed academics and journalists to study how the platform worked. In April, the company told its team behind CrowdTangle, a tool that provides data on the engagement and popularity of Facebook posts, that it was being broken up. While the tool still exists, the people who worked on it were moved to other teams.

Part of the impetus came from Mr. Schultz, who had grown frustrated with news coverage that used CrowdTangle data to show that Facebook was spreading misinformation, said two people involved in the discussions.

For academics who relied on CrowdTangle, it was a blow. Cameron Hickey, a misinformation researcher at the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonprofit focused on civic engagement, said he was “particularly angry” because he felt the CrowdTangle team was being punished for giving an unfiltered view of engagement on Facebook.

Mr. Schultz argued that Facebook should publish its own information about the site’s most popular content rather than supply access to tools like CrowdTangle, two people said. So in June, the company compiled a report on Facebook’s most-viewed posts for the first three months of 2021.

But Facebook did not release the report. After the policy communications team discovered that the top-viewed link for the period was a news story with a headline that suggested a doctor had died after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine, they feared the company would be chastised for contributing to vaccine hesitancy, according to internal emails reviewed by The New York Times.

A day before the report was supposed to be published, Mr. Schultz was part of a group that voted to shelve the document, according to the emails. He later posted an internal message about his role at Facebook, which was reviewed by The Times, saying, “I do care about protecting the company’s reputation, but I also care deeply about rigor and transparency.”

Facebook also worked to stamp out employee leaks. In July, the communications team shuttered comments on an internal forum that was used for companywide announcements. “OUR ONE REQUEST: PLEASE DON’T LEAK,” read a post about the change.

At the same time, Facebook ramped up its marketing. During the Olympics this summer, the company paid for television spots with the tagline “We change the game when we find each other,” to promote how it fostered communities. In the first half of this year, Facebook spent a record $6.1 billion on marketing and sales, up more than 8 percent from a year earlier, according to a recent earnings report.

Weeks later, the company further reduced the ability of academics to conduct research on it when it disabled the Facebook accounts and pages of a group of New York University researchers. The researchers had created a feature for web browsers that allowed them to see users’ Facebook activity, which 16,000 people had consented to use. The resulting data had led to studies showing that misleading political ads had thrived on Facebook during the 2020 election and that users engaged more with right-wing misinformation than many other types of content.

In a blog post, Facebook said the N.Y.U. researchers had violated rules around collecting user data, citing a privacy agreement it had originally struck with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012. The F.T.C. later admonished Facebook for invoking its agreement, saying it allowed for good-faith research in the public interest.

Laura Edelson, the lead N.Y.U. researcher, said Facebook cut her off because of the negative attention her work brought. “Some people at Facebook look at the effect of these transparency efforts and all they see is bad P.R.,” she said.

The episode was compounded this month when Facebook told misinformation researchers that it had mistakenly provided incomplete data on user interactions and engagement for two years for their work.

“It is inconceivable that most of modern life, as it exists on Facebook, isn’t analyzable by researchers,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University law professor, who is working on federal legislation to force the company to share data with academics.

In August, after Mr. Zuckerberg approved Project Amplify, the company tested the change in three U.S. cities, two people with knowledge of the effort said. While the company had previously used the News Feed to promote its own products and social causes, it had not turned to it to openly push positive press about itself, they said.

Once the tests began, Facebook used a system known as Quick Promotes to place stories about people and organizations that used the social network into users’ News Feeds, they said. People essentially see posts with a Facebook logo that link to stories and websites published by the company and from third-party local news sites. One story pushed “Facebook’s Latest Innovations for 2021” and discussed how it was achieving “100 percent renewable energy for our global operations.”

“This is a test for an informational unit clearly marked as coming from Facebook,” Mr. Osborne said, adding that Project Amplify was “similar to corporate responsibility initiatives people see in other technology and consumer products.”

Credit…Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg

Facebook’s defiance against unflattering revelations has also not let up, even without Mr. Zuckerberg. On Saturday, Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president for global affairs, wrote a blog post denouncing the premise of The Journal investigation. He said the idea that Facebook executives had repeatedly ignored warnings about problems was “just plain false.”

“These stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do,” Mr. Clegg said. He did not detail what the mischaracterizations were.

Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook. Looks like it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.

It looks like Apple and Facebook are at war over Facebook’s anti-privacy “engagement” business model:

Apple is introducing privacy controls to iOS14 which allow users to control who tracks them

Facebook took out newspaper ads attacking Apple for potentially harming its “targeted” advertising model.

Tim Cook’s Speech:

In a recent speech at Brussels’ International Data Privacy Day, Apple CEO Tim Cook went on the offensive against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Cook’s speech seems to be a direct response to Facebook’s recent attack on Apple, in which the world’s largest social network took out full-page ads in several newspapers attacking Apple’s new privacy changes.

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.

We should not look away from the bigger picture and a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theory is juiced by algorithms. We can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better, and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

Too many are still asking the question, ‘How much can we get away with?’ When they need to be asking, ‘What are the consequences?’

What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement?

What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?

What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users joining extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?

It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cause. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence.

A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.

Read more:

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/tim-cook-may-have-just-ended-facebook.html

Media Deception: Covid-19 Clickbait: Read the Whole Thing (Joe Rogan)

that have like their here’s a deceptive
01:53
one that i’ve read it was really fucked
01:55
up they were talking about this kid who
01:56
was I think he was 17 who died from
01:59
kovat and they said he was and they were
02:03
said he was healthy no under no other
02:05
health issues they said but then we read
02:09
the article deeper it turns out he had
02:10
diabetes he had
02:13
type one diabetes and he was 400 pounds
02:15
and it’s like wait a minute
02:17
the that’s not no issues these articles
02:21
are full of shit and they write those
02:23
articles just so that you click on them
02:24
because they get the the fucking ad
02:27
revenue from clicks and so they’re
02:29
incentivized to trick you into being
02:31
scared they’re like oh my god a 17 year
02:33
old died what happened my 17 year old
02:35
can die
02:36
holy fuck and then you click on it and
02:38
if you don’t read you know six seven
02:40
paragraphs into the article you don’t
02:42
find out that this was a 400-pound
02:44
diabetic kid that you know that’s what
02:48
have died from the flu three months
02:49
earlier it would have been the same shit
02:51
yeah yeah you know so the numbers are
02:53
fudged so I don’t want to believe your
02:55
numbers don’t come to me with more scare
02:57
tactics about like the numbers are
02:58
spiking well you already said that 50%
03:00
of the positives are false positives
03:02
well at least finally they’re saying
03:04
when they’re said the numbers are
03:06
spiking I haven’t heard the 50% fault
03:08
video there was the the chick that is
03:11
ill with Falchi the other one she was
03:14
saying 50% yeah I don’t know how old the
03:16
video was with it our testing is we’re
03:18
coming up and if you have one percent of
03:21
whatever and we test it and 50 you know
03:23
about half of the positives or false
03:25
positive Jesus and then I don’t wear a
03:28
mask
03:29
and you have to wear masks they said the
03:31
whole reason we have to flatten the
03:32
curve is because you can live on
03:34
anything for up to like nine days and
03:36
even an asymptomatic person can still
03:39
transmit it then it comes out they say
03:41
the exact opposite yeah now they’re
03:43
saying asymptomatic people very very
03:45
rarely twelve-minute I don’t choose to
03:46
believe that Joe I’m gonna relieve what
03:50
they told me the first time not gonna do
03:51
it not the new facts that they have now
03:54
so we’re still gonna wear masks all the
03:55
time yeah people get mad at you if you
03:58
suggest differently there’s a lot of
04:00
people that like being scared too and
04:02
you’re like fuck you love it we’re your
04:03
goddamn masks we need to protect people
04:06
love it but meanwhile snow policed who’s
04:08
gonna protect you and you who’s gonna
04:10
protect your family me meanwhile there
04:13
was no be these people weren’t freaking
04:14
out when you’ve seen these mass protests
04:16
and the spikes guess what happened right
04:19
after the protest and at least they’re
04:21
saying that now at least they’re saying
04:23
they’re being forced into saying is
04:25
probably connected
04:27
the protests well of course it’s just
04:30
one way to get attacked to get people to
04:31
skate let’s scare them to stop revolting
04:34
let’s give them let’s get them chill out
04:36
you got you know now the numbers are
04:38
spiking guys do you think it’s that
04:39
calculated that that’s what they’re
04:41
doing I think there’s a lot of
04:42
calculated shit going on
04:43
there’s too many weird things going on
04:44
I’m like who’s calculating I’m though I
04:46
think that it’s dr. evil I think it is I
04:50
think that they’re in like their thing
04:51
and next we’re gonna launch the sharks
04:54
with laser beams on their head what
04:56
happened to murder Hornets they came and
04:57
went real quick I was really worried
04:59
about them aliens bro fuck I put it out
05:01
there and you come well ends are coming
05:04
before before the election Dave’s like
05:06
listen man I got to do something I got
05:09
to figure this out it’s all been
05:10
approved by the governor everybody’s you
05:12
know distanced six feet apart they all
05:15
maintain social distancing during the
05:17
show they wear masks during the show how
05:19
long what’s this how long are we to keep
05:21
doing this Texas governor is people to
05:24
stay home states report surges of nuke
05:26
ovid 19 cases yeah you want to see the
05:29
photo of the Austin protests you’ve seen
05:32
it it’s crazy
05:33
you know Austin which is the most
05:35
progressive city in Texas had this
05:37
insane protest which listen I think is
05:40
great I do I think it’s great that
05:42
people want to show solidarity that
05:44
people want to to get out there and and
05:47
let everybody know that they’re they’re
05:49
not down with police brutality and that
05:52
they’re there they’re down with racial
05:54
equality and that you got all these
05:56
thousands and thousands of people
05:58
together to have the same positive
06:00
message I love it however that Co vid
06:04
doesn’t give a fuck about racial
06:07
equality or social justice if you’re if
06:10
you’re not healthy it’s gonna get you I
06:12
don’t know and the case is spike but the
06:15
other thing about Texas is a giant
06:17
percentage of it I think somewhere in
06:19
the neighborhood at 50% is actually in
06:20
prisons so when they’re talking about
06:22
statewide issues did you have an image
06:25
so I can get an image for you I got a
06:28
good one for you oh that’s a good one
06:29
yeah that’ll cause problem
06:32
look at his fucking people but one thing
06:36
they have found out if you guys if you
06:38
guys are gonna protest protest during
06:39
the day and this is why there’s been a
06:42
new study that came out that said that
06:43
kovat 19 dies almost instantly in
06:47
contact with sunlight
06:48
no Trump’s say that like two months ago
06:50
and everyone said he was crazy no he was
06:53
saying like put lights to the body no he
06:55
said when the summer comes that he knows
06:58
it but it’s not but it’s not the heat
06:59
it’s actually light so the nighttime is
07:04
just as dangerous in the summer it is as
07:06
it is during the day it’s not heat it’s
07:08
not a temperature issue I’m sure some
07:09
temperature kills it Joe this thing is
07:11
not real bro this is not real it’s not
07:15
really a joint it is the fucking flu
07:17
yeah let’s do it dude it’s not real you
07:21
don’t think it’s real I think that the
07:22
flu is real I think that people get sick
07:25
from the flu every year and die I think
07:26
that it’s a it’s a bad thing I don’t
07:29
think that all of this nonsense is going
07:31
on and they keep keep perpetuating it
07:34
and keep perpetuating keep perpetuating
07:35
it come on I just not buying anything I
07:40
just you guys you change your views and
07:43
change your opinions it’s like it’s like
07:45
if you were the writer of a TV show say
07:47
friends your job would be to write a 30
07:50
minute episode that was funny and
07:53
intriguing and dramatic and fucking
07:56
scary or whatever the fuck
07:58
and like the the media just writes an
08:00
episode and then the next day they like
08:02
write a new episode and write a new
08:03
episode and like change their shit I
08:05
understand
08:06
such bullshit I understand what you
08:08
saying I’m gonna give you a different
08:09
perspective okay this is the different
08:11
perspective the different perspective is
08:13
legit biologists have analyzed the
08:16
actual virus itself and they find all
08:18
sorts of problems with this virus I had
08:20
Brett Weinstein on the podcast the other
08:21
day he’s a professor a legit biologist
08:24
and he was discussing all of the
08:27
indicators in the virus that seemed to
08:30
point to the fact that this has probably
08:31
been leaked from a lab and explained it
08:34
in terms of the way viruses evolve I’m
08:36
gonna do a terrible job of paraphrasing
08:38
it because I’m a moron and he’s
08:39
brilliant but when he said in the long
08:42
run what he’s basically saying is this
08:44
is a very legit virus
08:46
it’s very complicated because of the
08:48
fact that it’s been fucked with because
08:50
this is not a virus like you know like a
08:53
regular cold or like anything else that
08:55
we’ve encountered before this is
08:57
something that’s really complicated and
08:59
may have evolved because it came from a
09:02
lab his perspective is it may have
09:04
evolved to transmit better indoors and
09:08
it’s very vulnerable to UV light which
09:10
also might be part of you know it being
09:14
from a lab and not something that
09:15
existed in the wild that actually just
09:17
jumped from a bat to a Pangolin to a
09:20
person or what have you so legit
09:23
scientists and biologists who are not a
09:25
part of the narrative they’re not
09:27
working for any government agency
09:28
they’re not a part of the news media
09:30
that’s trying to transmit propaganda
09:33
they are concerned with it and they’re
09:35
concerned with it for very specific
09:37
scientific reasons now me as a person
09:40
who doesn’t know what the fuck any of
09:41
that stuff I just said means really I
09:43
just repeat it
09:44
it sounds like I’m smart but they the
09:47
the smart people actually are worried
09:50
about it for very specific reasons that
09:51
he could explain to you now it’s not
09:53
vulnerable for a lot of people they’re
09:56
not gonna be vulnerable like pro
09:57
athletes we were talking about those NBA
09:59
players to get it listen those are top
10:01
of the food chain stud athletes they
10:04
shake it off they’re not experiencing
10:06
any symptoms you know over and over and
10:08
over again there’s a lot of people that
10:10
get injured selber shook it off there’s
10:11
a lot of people that get it shake it off
10:13
they barely get it they barely even know
10:14
they have it
10:15
but they’re really robust healthy people
10:19
the concern is people that aren’t old
10:22
people
10:23
people that are vulnerable when they get
10:24
it man they get it bad and I was reading
10:26
an article today about a woman who’s
10:28
been sick with kovat for a hundred days
10:29
now and she still has days she has like
10:32
these horrible flu-like symptoms and she
10:34
gets real wheezy but I think she has
10:36
multiple sclerosis and she’s got some
10:38
other underlying health conditions so
10:40
those people have to really be worried
10:42
about this because it’s not predictable
10:44
and they don’t know how to treat it
10:45
totally especially in the beginning
10:47
turned out when they put people on
10:50
ventilators my buddy Michael yo got it
10:51
and he got it early on and his doctor
10:54
told him if I put you on a ventilator
10:55
you’re probably gonna die because your
10:57
body’s gonna stop breathing for itself
10:59
it’s good to let
11:00
but the ventilator do all the work the
11:02
ventilator like 90% of people put on
11:05
ventilators I think or 80 80 per side
11:08
for anything ever died is that true I
11:12
don’t know that’s what I said
11:13
80 to 80 percent so when the question is
11:16
almost like we need 40,000 ventilators
11:18
because we’re who are you saving when
11:20
80% of those people are gonna die
11:21
the thing is though like I think the
11:23
ventilator one way you could look at it
11:25
the ventilator is such a last-ditch
11:27
effort that by the time you get that
11:29
what is that was it
11:30
ice-cold why is it school delicious what
11:32
happy for you much what a good man he
11:34
brings his own beer you fucking study
11:36
with all kinds of um I brought you some
11:39
ignite stuff too Oh Danson found out the
11:42
Dan Bilzerian tell me he’s writing a
11:46
book yeah I think he did write his book
11:50
yeah that one’s for Marshall my dog’s
11:54
been using it too it’s really good stuff
11:57
you know Dan everything’s the best he’s
12:03
he’s jumped balls deep into weed and CBD
12:06
yeah right look at that dog CBD it even
12:09
says it on there I fucked up with CBD MD
12:12
and I took some of their dogs CBD was
12:14
delicious peanut butter flavor
12:15
I think it’s final I’m sure why not CBD
12:19
but they make it flavors for dogs what’s
12:23
up cool ass more shit what is the RAM
12:35
said I think it’s a goat head I asked
12:39
him once about and I care member what
12:41
the answer was I think it’s always been
12:42
like his thing that’s that’s like Satan
12:45
right what is the one the the devil that
12:48
has the goat head is it Beelzebub sounds
12:52
good it sounds like they’ll be correct
12:57
Thank You Satan no what is it
13:00
which one
13:03
you gotta be careful you know you get
13:06
people so high that they get super
13:08
paranoid and they look down that goat
13:09
head Baphomet
13:10
Oh Baphomet that’s right I’ve seen him
13:12
on things before that’s like something
13:14
Duncan would know a lot about come on
13:18
man hey Dan why is that guy on the cover
13:20
your fucking partner where’s that goat
13:24
dude with with eagle-wing go dude oh
13:27
look guys creepies fuck with his
13:28
pentagram on his head houston I see you
13:34
capacity could soon be exceeded as kovat
13:37
19 hospital agents worsen command and
13:39
all the videos come out and it’s like
13:41
people and going to the hospitals and
13:44
there’s no lines that they’re trying to
13:46
make it out to be you know there’s a lot
13:47
of there’s a lot of fuckery going on
13:49
with this misinformation and that’s
13:52
there’s a little bit of the newest of
13:54
the newer but there’s also real shit
13:56
going on okay dr. Peter Hotez he’s been
13:59
on the podcast before National School of
14:00
Tropical Medicine diseases Tropical
14:03
Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine
14:05
he’s a brilliant guy yeah it says the
14:07
city of Houston which is known for its
14:09
medical schools has a large
14:11
concentration of beds and research
14:13
hospitals and whatnot and they’re very
14:14
close to running out of all of their ICU
14:16
beds he said he called on the state to
14:18
reimpose more aggressive social
14:20
distancing restrictions so he’s not a
14:22
he’s not a foolish person if he’s saying
14:24
this he’s a legit scientist and a doctor
14:27
and he knows a tremendous amount about
14:29
diseases I met him many many years ago
14:36
[Applause]