Posted on 09/20/2022 8:49:29 AM PDT by Starman417
Lord John Acton once said "“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I cannot be completely certain, but I think he was referring to Mark Zuckerberg. Money brings power and Zuckerberg has lot and lots of money.
When Facebook was created, it promised to allow free speech. It also had plenty of critics
The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site.Eventually, power does corrupt. Over time, Facebook started cracking down on what it considered to be posts outside of the mysterious "Community Standards."
No one outside of Facebook "fact checkers" really knows what they are. Today such murky standards are most often invoked to restrict the posts and opinions of conservatives.Mark Zuckerberg offered a stalwart defense of liberal values on free speech last week, and it’s a sign of our illiberal times that progressives were his biggest critics. A Joe Biden spokesman accused the Facebook CEO of using “the Constitution as a shield for his company’s bottom line,” and pundits on Twitter raged at his refusal to censor ads for Donald Trump.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s offense was standing up for John Mill’s liberal marketplace of ideas that liberals used to stand for. At Georgetown University and in our pages Thursday, he committed Facebook to uphold a wide definition of free expression. This is good news with major implications for how information is distributed in the 21st century if Facebook honors this pledge.
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Facebook is a private company that isn’t obliged to follow a First Amendment standard. The company understandably doesn’t want its platform to resemble Gab or 8chan or PornHub, where obscene or violent content festers, as that would degrade the user experience. Facebook therefore regulates the outside boundaries of expression on its platform, but Mr. Zuckerberg says he doesn’t want the definition of impermissible speech to expand beyond “what is absolutely necessary.”
Not long-ago Facebook permanently banned Libs of TikTok for posting uncomfortable truths.
Facebook has been called "America’s biggest suppressor of free speech - and proud of it"
“A lot of people have egg on their face” for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory, tweeted ABC News’ Jonathan Karl this week. “Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.”Facebook claims to use certain "algorithms" to monitor posts. As each national election nears, Facebook's algorithms spring into hyper action and vigilance. Here's where it all goes really wrong. Facebook heavily censored the NY Post's 2020 story about the Hunter Biden laptop. Many, including me, saw their accounts warned and locked up for a while when posting about it. Zuckerberg blamed the FBI:“Media coverage of [the] lab leak was a debacle,” writes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, “and a major source of that failure was Groupthink cultivated on Twitter.”
Such bias is old news these days, and the Internet allows readers to seek other outlets. But one great threat to the free transmission of ideas remains: social media that routinely suppresses free speech. A prime culprit is Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which has become the most effective suppressor of freedom of speech in American history.
That’s something it boasts about. In April 2020, Facebook reports slapping “warnings” on 50 million COVID-19 items and adds that 95 percent of readers don’t seek the original content. It boasts that it “reduces the distribution” of information rated as “false” by its “fact-checkers.”
Facebook purports to rely on international and national health agencies, like the China-dominated World Health Organization and the US’s Centers for Disease Control, with its laughable requirement that summer campers wear masks this year. Its ranks of fact-checkers are undoubtedly tilted toward recent graduates of woke universities attracted to its headquarters in the no-non-lefties-allowed San Francisco Bay area.
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert,'” Zuckerberg said on Thursday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”He says he regrets it.Zuckerberg said the FBI added, “‘We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.'”
Zuckerberg told Rogan, “We just kind of thought: Hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
The tech billionaire and Meta CEO made the stunning claim during a wide-ranging, nearly three-hour interview in which he also admitted to podcaster Joe Rogan that he regretted the move and admitted that “it sucks.”I don't buy that for one second. Zuckerberg spent big on the 2020 election. He poured $419 million into select (i.e., democrat) NGO's to shape the outcome.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Zuck was always corrupt.
Zuckerberg not doing toll well now he lost about half of his money this year 71 billion.
Breitbart I think it’s there
A year ago, it was worth $1 trillion. Today - $400 billion.
From memory, Zuck owned 30% of the stock when the IPO came out.
Today, Zuck owns just 12%, so he has probably avoided a lot of financial suffering that has smacked his investors and employees very hard.
Zucks biggest business problem today?
No one has any idea what the "Metaverse" is!
Mencken described the driving force behind Zuckerberg's etc. power thusly:
"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly."... H.L. Mencken; Baltimore Evening Sun; September 18, 1926.
“Facebook is a private company that isn’t obliged to follow a First Amendment standard.”
Well see about that when the DeSantis suit percolates up to the Supremes.
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