Sacha Baron Cohen on the state of society

meet the press this week was a special episode on disinfo. here are a couple segments. 

The second video has no sound

  On 12/30/2019 at 12:53 AM, whosebrian said:

The second video has no sound

 

it's soft

facebook employees write open letter to zuckerberg, agreeing with what everyone else says about making money by amplifying liars.

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We are proud to work here.

Facebook stands for people expressing their voice. Creating a place where we can debate, share different opinions, and express our views is what makes our app and technologies meaningful for people all over the world.

We are proud to work for a place that enables that expression, and we believe it is imperative to evolve as societies change. As Chris Cox said, “We know the effects of social media are not neutral, and its history has not yet been written.”

This is our company.

We’re reaching out to you, the leaders of this company, because we’re worried we’re on track to undo the great strides our product teams have made in integrity over the last two years. We work here because we care, because we know that even our smallest choices impact communities at an astounding scale. We want to raise our concerns before it’s too late.

Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.

Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy.

Allowing paid civic misinformation to run on the platform in its current state has the potential to:

— Increase distrust in our platform by allowing similar paid and organic content to sit side-by-side — some with third-party fact-checking and some without. Additionally, it communicates that we are OK profiting from deliberate misinformation campaigns by those in or seeking positions of power.

— Undo integrity product work. Currently, integrity teams are working hard to give users more context on the content they see, demote violating content, and more. For the Election 2020 Lockdown, these teams made hard choices on what to support and what not to support, and this policy will undo much of that work by undermining trust in the platform. And after the 2020 Lockdown, this policy has the potential to continue to cause harm in coming elections around the world.

Proposals for improvement

Our goal is to bring awareness to our leadership that a large part of the employee body does not agree with this policy. We want to work with our leadership to develop better solutions that both protect our business and the people who use our products. We know this work is nuanced, but there are many things we can do short of eliminating political ads altogether.

These suggestions are all focused on ad-related content, not organic.

1. Hold political ads to the same standard as other ads.

a. Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized detrimental impact on our community. We should not accept money for political ads without applying the standards that our other ads have to follow.

2. Stronger visual design treatment for political ads.

a. People have trouble distinguishing political ads from organic posts. We should apply a stronger design treatment to political ads that makes it easier for people to establish context.

3. Restrict targeting for political ads.

a. Currently, politicians and political campaigns can use our advanced targeting tools, such as Custom Audiences. It is common for political advertisers to upload voter rolls (which are publicly available in order to reach voters) and then use behavioral tracking tools (such as the FB pixel) and ad engagement to refine ads further. The risk with allowing this is that it’s hard for people in the electorate to participate in the “public scrutiny” that we’re saying comes along with political speech. These ads are often so micro-targeted that the conversations on our platforms are much more siloed than on other platforms. Currently we restrict targeting for housing and education and credit verticals due to a history of discrimination. We should extend similar restrictions to political advertising.

4. Broader observance of the election silence periods

a. Observe election silence in compliance with local laws and regulations. Explore a self-imposed election silence for all elections around the world to act in good faith and as good citizens.

5. Spend caps for individual politicians, regardless of source

a. FB has stated that one of the benefits of running political ads is to help more voices get heard. However, high-profile politicians can out-spend new voices and drown out the competition. To solve for this, if you have a PAC and a politician both running ads, there would be a limit that would apply to both together, rather than to each advertiser individually.

6. Clearer policies for political ads

a. If FB does not change the policies for political ads, we need to update the way they are displayed. For consumers and advertisers, it’s not immediately clear that political ads are exempt from the fact-checking that other ads go through. It should be easily understood by anyone that our advertising policies about misinformation don’t apply to original political content or ads, especially since political misinformation is more destructive than other types of misinformation.

Therefore, the section of the policies should be moved from “prohibited content” (which is not allowed at all) to “restricted content” (which is allowed with restrictions).

We want to have this conversation in an open dialog because we want to see actual change.

We are proud of the work that the integrity teams have done, and we don’t want to see that undermined by policy. Over the coming months, we’ll continue this conversation, and we look forward to working towards solutions together.

This is still our company.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-letter.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

"you are all fired. pac your things. security will escort you out"

responding to this:

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Facebook's final word on political ads: No changes to microtargeting but more control for users

Facebook won't change its policies on fact-checking ads promoted by politicians or limit political campaigns' microtargeting abilities, the company said Wednesday.

Instead, Facebook announced that it will expand transparency around political ads and give its users more control over the ads they see.

The decision comes after the company endured more than three months of criticism from Democratic politicians and activists over its decision not to fact-check ads from political campaigns. In that time, Twitter banned political ads altogether, while Google announced changes to how ads can be microtargeted to users.

While Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg never planned to ban political ads on the platform nor to change the policy on fact-checking, sources familiar with Facebook's discussions previously told NBC News, the company had considered limits on microtargeting of ads from politicians.

Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, announced a series of changes to the Facebook Ad Library on Wednesday, including revealing new data showing the estimated target audience size for each ad and new tools that will make it easier to search for and browse political ads.

"While Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads; we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads," Leathern wrote in a blog post on Facebook's corporate website.

Facebook's decision to keep its microtargeting policy was in part a response to campaigns and other political groups that told Facebook that they rely on microtargeting to reach audiences they would not have access to without social media platforms like Facebook, Leathern said.

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in other news, Mark Zuckerberg Got $27.3 Billion Richer In 2019

this might be the final straw that pushes me to finally making my custom t-shirt idea happen

Can't decide whether it should be zucc or "the zucc"

please don’t defile the righteous zucchini by associating it even jokingly with the vile capitalist pig Zuckerberg. 

Delete your social media presence, cut the neighbourhood power cables and go live in the forest.

  On 1/9/2020 at 5:57 PM, BobDobalina said:

this might be the final straw that pushes me to finally making my custom t-shirt idea happen

Can't decide whether it should be zucc or "the zucc"

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Please combine with the pic whosebrian posted directly before your post. Also, whats the deal with zucc instead of zuck?

I'll tee up a meeting between my people and @whosebrians and see if we can leverage some cross-platform vertical synergy.

And thanks to habitual overdosing on dank memes lifestyle, some of us only know it as the Zucc

  On 1/9/2020 at 4:15 PM, whosebrian said:

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Also, this needs to be a new emoticon.

It's for the "I'm an obnoxious rich fucc and my wealth comes from the suffering of my minions. you cant touch me" emotion.

/fucczuccgrin

b&j joining patagonia, north face, rei, boycotting fb ads platform. 

thanks zuck

this was actually kind of good. zuckerberg & dorsey vs senate judiciary, nov 17, 2020

whitehouse, hawley, and booker all had good questioning

  On 11/18/2020 at 5:22 AM, very honest said:

this was actually kind of good. zuckerberg & dorsey vs senate judiciary, nov 17, 2020

 

whitehouse, hawley, and booker all had good questioning

 

 

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Some of the questions are really dumb though. Like honestly do you expect a CEO of a company that size to be aware of everything that goes on there? And asking for specific figures on this stuff? What else can Zucc say but "I'll get back to you on that"?

  On 11/18/2020 at 5:57 AM, sweepstakes said:

Some of the questions are really dumb though. Like honestly do you expect a CEO of a company that size to be aware of everything that goes on there? And asking for specific figures on this stuff? What else can Zucc say but "I'll get back to you on that"?

for sure. some kind of surreal moments in there, though. and not as bad as many recent hearings. 

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Sacha Baron Cohen Has a Message for Mark Zuckerber‪g‬

In this episode of “Sway,” Kara Swisher and Baron Cohen discuss whether Silicon Valley C.E.O.s should be liable for the content on their platforms, what the rift in the Democratic Party means for future elections and — of course — what else happened with Rudy Giuliani.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-sacha-baron-cohen.html?action=click&module=audio-series-bar&region=header&pgtype=Article

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sacha-baron-cohen-has-a-message-for-mark-zuckerberg/id1528594034?i=1000510597439