This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.

The same PR Firm, Definers Public Affairs, who coordinated their anti-Semitic, anti-Soros, fake news effort, also targeted Facebook's competitors. Still from the NY Times piece:

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers’ work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook’s criticism upset Facebook.

This anti-Apple pettiness didn't end with the fake news campaign, either. As reported by Business Insider:

Earlier this spring, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a very public manner related to its privacy scandals and the Cambridge Analytica affair.

Zuckerberg called Cook's criticism "extremely glib," and apparently he was seething behind closed doors. He was mad enough to tell his executives to use Android phones instead of Apple's iPhone, according to a massive new report from The New York Times.

"Mr. Cook's criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones, since the operating system has far more users than Apple's," states the report.

Between the anti-Semitism, the spreading of fake news (even as they claim to Congress that they're doing everything they can to combat fake news on their own service), and the sheer pettiness of forcing his employees to use Android instead of iPhone because he doesn't like the way Tim Cook capitalized on his own lack of competence, ethics, and possibly simple humanity, none of these new revelations are at all helpful to Mark Zuckerberg, or to Facebook. Vox sums it up nicely:

Needless to say, none of this makes Facebook look good. The company had a massive PR problem even before these new allegations came to light. Vox’s Emily Stewart went into detail after Zuckerberg went on a mea culpa tour in April:

Facebook has admitted the majority of its users’ information has been accessed by third parties, that it scans messages, and that it keep pretty much all of your data forever. It just announced it found more evidence of Russian troll accounts. Zuckerberg last week said uncovering nefarious content is going to be a “never-ending battle” and that you “never fully solve security.”

The company is not alone: Twitter, for instance, was pressured into purging users from its platform to get rid of bots and suspicious users, but has yet to fully combat online trolls. But Facebook has had a particularly rough last 18 months. From providing a platform for hate speech and Russian disinformation in the 2016 election, to its handling of users’ data, crisis after crisis have begun to snowball for the social media giant.

And as the report shows, the company went through exorbitant lengths to save face, from calling in political favors, to going on charm offenses. But even before these new details surfaced, it seems that few of their efforts paid off.

It would seem that some members of Congress, in particular, have had enough. As reported by The Hill:

Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline (D) sharply criticized tech giant Facebook on Twitter on Wednesday evening, arguing that the social media company can't be trusted any longer to regulate itself.

In a series of tweets, the lawmaker ripped into Facebook executives over a New York Times report detailing how the company used a Republican opposition research firm to link public detractors of the company to billionaire Democratic donor George Soros amid criticism of Facebook for its use by Russian operatives to influence Americans during the 2016 election. The report was based mainly on anonymous, insider accounts.

"We’ve known for some time that @Facebook chose to turn a blind eye to the spread of hate speech and Russian propaganda on its platform," Cicilline wrote Wednesday night.

"Now we know that once they knew the truth, top @Facebook executives did everything they could to hide it from the public by using a playbook of suppressing opposition and propagating conspiracy theories," he added. "It is long past time for us to take action."

Cicilline, who is the ranking member and likely incoming chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law and also sits on the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, also accused Facebook executives of attempting to "buy Congress's silence" on the issue and prevent lawmakers from taking meaningful action.

Yes, that's right: with Democrats poised to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the likely incoming head of the committee that deals with antitrust law has the knives out for Facebook, specifically because of today's revelations. Facebook were spreading fake news in an effort to avoid exactly this outcome; that their hypocritical, anti-Semitic, and downright petty efforts have likely fed into a concerted legislative effort to finally bring them to heel, and maybe break them up entirely, is pure poetic justice.

It can't come soon enough. Hopefully the surviving victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and the families of those who didn't survive, are on the ball enough to file a class action lawsuit as well, to add to Zuckerberg's problems, because Zuck, and Sheryl Sandberg, and the rest of Facebook's pack of conscience-less hypocrites deserve no less.

The NY Times piece is a good, if infuriating, read, and covers a lot more ground in a lot more detail than the few excerpts that I've quoted here. You owe it to yourself, and to your democracy, to read the whole thing. And, once you've read it, to delete your Facebook account.

Seriously, fuck Facebook.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#FuckFacebook
#deleteFacebook