Tag Archives: Zuckerberg

Buying Political Office

Americans are about to experience the political results of our new Gilded Age. After some forty plus years of growing financial inequality–where the gap between the rich and the rest has steadily grown–we have inaugurated a government by and for the obscenely rich.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently noted, Elon Musk is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Musk–who benefits from government contracts worth billions of dollars–will be in an office adjacent to the White House. (Whatever happened to that old-fashioned notion about the necessity of avoiding conflicts of interest?)

It isn’t just Musk. Other members of the world’s richest men’s club flanked Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. They reportedly included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who are worth almost a trillion dollars combined, were joined by other obscenely rich panderers: the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

During his confirmation hearing, the billionaire nominee Trump has chosen for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, outlined his plans to enrich the rich (and screw over the poor) during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, telling committee members that extending Trump’s tax cuts for the rich would be his highest priority.

Trump has assembled a cabinet notable for the wealth of his nominees (and equally notable for their lack of relevant knowledge and experience), but as the Brookings Institution has recently pointed out, American governance by the rich rather than the competent has grown significantly at all levels.

The linked study documented three major conclusions, of which only the last is at all comforting:

Altogether, across four election cycles from 2018 to 2024 there were 183 candidates who contributed more than $1 million of personal money to their campaigns.

Republicans constituted 68% of all candidates contributing more than a million to their campaigns.

Most rich people who spend personal money on campaigns lose.

The study’s introductory paragraph asked the pertinent question.

The richest man in the world now sits close to the President elect and uses his powerful social media platform, X, to opine on everything from daylight savings time to visas for skilled workers. As the new administration takes shape, the number of multi-millionaires and billionaires moving to Washington grows. While this is good for Washington area real estate agents, is it good for democracy? Will someone who earns $14 million per day be able to appreciate how important $1,976.00 (the average monthly social security payment) is to millions of Americans?

The obvious answer to the question posed by that last sentence is no. The Brookings article cited a previous study that looked at the political priorities of the rich.

In 2013, three political scientists studied the political views of over 100 rich Americans, whose median wealth was $7,500,000.00. They found large differences between the policy preferences of the rich compared to average Americans. 

Ya think?

Every so often, I cite a musical lyric that seems (at least to me) to illuminate a current political issue. Here’s one: the flower girl in My Fair Lady sings that all she wants is a “room somewhere, far away from the cold night air”–somewhere where she can have “warm hands, warm face, warm feet.” There are far too many Americans who fall into that category–people struggling every day to find lodging or keep the heat on and the car running and the baby fed.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires have absolutely no understanding of those struggles, no comprehension of the choices facing millions of America’s working poor–and rather clearly, no sympathy for them.

There are certainly wealthy individuals who do understand that their own ability to thrive depends upon a government that supports an economically stable middle class–who understand that job creation depends upon the existence of a public with enough disposable income to buy their widgets, rather than on the whim of an “entrepreneur” waving a magic wand. Those individuals didn’t share the dias with the fat-cat, self-satisfied billionaires who will have effective control of America’s government and who are interested only in amassing greater wealth and power. Trump’s billionaire toadies have evidenced zero understanding of the purpose of government and no interest whatsoever in the notion of the common good. 

President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, and he was right. President Biden warned us about the coming oligarchy, and he was also right.

Between the White Christian Nationalists and the oligarchs, the next few years will be…challenging. To say the least. 

Comments

Meta Goes Vichy

The term “Vichy” refers to the shameful, collaborationist government in World War II France, during that country’s Nazi occupation. In the run-up to the Trump/MAGA occupation of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg just announced Vichy Meta.

Meta won’t be even a small part of the resistance.

Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will end its longstanding fact-checking program. Third-party fact-checking was originally instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Meta’s other social media apps.

The change was the latest sign of how companies owned by multi-zillionaires are “repositioning” (aka groveling) in preparation for the Trump presidency.

The Bulwark headlined the move “Mark Zuckerberg is a Surrender Monkey,” pointing out that he’d recently named Joel Kaplan as the company’s head of public policy. Kaplan isn’t just a Republican in good standing, he’s a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh, and–according to the article– “somewhere between friendly-toward and horny-for Trumpism.” He also appointed Dana White, manager of something called Ultimate Fighting Championship to Meta’s board of directors. That background is arguably  irrelevant to Meta’s business, but his usefulness rather clearly isn’t in any expertise he possesses; instead, his “value” clearly lies in being one of Donald Trump’s closest friends and top endorsers. 

Add to that Zuckerberg’s one million dollar donation to Trump’s Inaugural fund.

Kaplan went on Fox & Friends (of course) to explain that Facebook is killing its fact-checking program in order to make its content moderation strategy more like Elon Musk’s Twitter/X regime.  

As all sentient Americans are aware, when Musk purchased Twitter (which he awkwardly re-named X), he promised unfettered free speech. He then proceeded to invite back users who had previously been banned for bad behavior. He then fired content moderation teams, and replaced them with crowdsourced “community notes” below disputed content. That is the model Meta is adopting.

So–how are things going at X?

Numerous studies have documented the enormous amounts of false and hateful content now on X. Antisemitic, racist and misogynistic posts rose sharply immediately after Musk’s takeover, and have continued to proliferate. It hasn’t only been the bigotry. Disinformation about issues like climate change and migration has exploded, and users are spending greater amounts of time liking and reposting items from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Hamas. 

There’s a reason so many advertisers have fled and former users of the platform have decamped for Bluesky.

The Bulwark reproduced Zuckerberg’s tweets announcing the change, including one jaw-dropping post explaining that the company would move its “trust and safety and content moderation teams” out of California and send them to Texas, to allay concerns about content-moderation bias. (If just being located in a Blue state creates bias, what sort of bias can we expect from people located in and influenced by Greg Abbott’s Red, retrograde Texas?)

All this to pander to an incoming autocrat whose continuing mental decline becomes more obvious every day. In his most recent press conference, Trump once again threatened to invade Greenland–owned by our ally Denmark– and to recapture the Panama Canal (which he inexplicably explained was necessary to counter China.) He also announced his intention to make Canada part of the U.S., and to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, I’m sure those measures will bring down the price of eggs….

This is the buffoon who will soon occupy the Oval Office. The fact that a (slim) majority of Americans voted for this mentally-ill ignoramus is depressing enough, but recognizing that we have large numbers of citizens who vote their White Christian Nationalism is one thing; the fact that people who clearly know better are willing to surrender their integrity in advance in order to stay in the good graces of the lunatic-in-charge is appalling. 

Facebook has already morphed from a useful platform allowing us to interact with family and friends into a site where advertisements vastly outnumber real posts. Its content moderators were already bending over backwards to accommodate Rightwing worldviews. How many users have the time or energy–or interest–to rebut blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories? For that matter, in a platform increasingly occupied by “bubbles”–where we interact mostly with people who already agree with us–will we even see the sorts of misinformation and disinformation that will be posted and enthusiastically shared by people who desperately want to believe that vaccines are a liberal plot and Jews have space lasers?

As Timothy Snyder wrote in “On Tyranny,” this is how democracies die: by surrendering in advance.

Comments

Facebook And False Equivalence

Is it just me, or do the months between now and November seem interminable?

In the run-up to what will be an existentially-important decision for America’s future, we are living through an inconsistent, contested and politicized quarantine, mammoth protests triggered by a series of racist police murders of unarmed black men, and their   cynical escalation into riots by advocates of race war, and daily displays of worsening insanity from the White House–including, but certainly not limited to, America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic followed by a phone call in which our “eloquent” President called governors “weak” and “jerks” for not waging war on their own citizens.

And in the midst of it all, a pissing match between the Psychopath-in-Chief and Twitter, which has finally–belately–decided to label some of Trump’s incendiary and inaccurate tweets for what they are.

We can only hope this glimmer of responsibility from Twitter continues. The platform’s unwillingness to apply the same rules to Trump that they apply to other users hasn’t just been cowardly–it has given his constant lies a surface plausibility and normalized his bile. We should all applaud Twitter’s belated recognition of its responsibility.

Then, of course, there’s Facebook.

It isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg is unaware of the harms being caused by Facebooks current algorithms. Numerous media outlets have reported on the company’s internal investigations into the way those algorithms encourage division and distort political debate. In her column last Sunday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd reported

The Wall Street Journal had a chilling report a few days ago that Facebook’s own research in 2018 revealed that “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

Mark Zuckerberg shelved the research.

The reasons are both depressing and ironic: in addition to concerns that less vitriol might mean users spending less time on the site, Zuckerberg understands that reducing the spread of untrue, divisive content would require eliminating substantially more material from the right than the left, opening the company to accusations of bias against conservatives.

Similar fears are said to be behind Facebook’s unwillingness to police political speech in advertisements and posts.

Think about it: Facebook knows that its platform is enormously influential. It know that the Right trades in conspiracy theories and intentional misinformation to a much greater extent than the Left, skewing the information landscape in dangerous ways. But for whatever reason– in order to insulate the company from regulation, or to curry favor with wealthy investors, or to escape the anger of the Breitbarts and Limbaughs–not to mention Trump–it has chosen to “allow people to make their own decisions.”

The ubiquity of social media presents lawmakers with significant challenges. Despite all the blather from the White House and the uninformed hysteria of ideologues, the issue isn’t censorship or freedom of speech–as anyone who has taken elementary civics knows, the Bill of Rights prohibits government from censoring communication. Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites aren’t government. For that matter, under current law, they aren’t even considered “publishers” who could be held accountable for whatever inaccurate drivel a user posts.

That means social media companies have the right to dictate their own terms of use. There is no legal impediment to Facebook or Twitter “censoring” posts they consider vile, obscene or untrue. (Granted, there are significant practical and marketing concerns involved in such an effort.) On Monday, reports emerged that Facebook’s own employees–including several in management–are clamoring for the platform to emulate Twitter’s new approach.

There have always been cranks and liars, racists and political propagandists. There haven’t always been easily accessible, worldwide platforms through which they could connect with similarly twisted individuals and spread their poisons. One of the many challenges of our technological age is devising constitutionally-appropriate ways to regulate those platforms.

If Mark Zuckerberg is unwilling to make FaceBook at least a minimally-responsible overseer of our national conversation–if he and his board cannot make and enforce reasonable rules about veracity in posts, a future government will undoubtedly do it for them–something that could set a dangerous precedent.

Refusing to be responsible– supporting a false equivalency that is tearing the country apart– is a much riskier strategy than Zuckerberg seems to recognize.

On the other hand, it finally seems to be dawning on Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, that (as Dowd put it in her column)”Trump and Twitter were a match made in hell.”

Comments