Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Cook testify in Congressional Hearing

Google still wants to be over there so bad. Zucc knows he doesn't have a chance in hell, so gets to say whatever he wants. https://t.co/0hZhmsqvJX

— Littlefoot (@LTF_01) July 30, 2020

Zuckerberg argues for free expression

In the Wall Street Journal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a case here for free expression. I hope he means what he says.

"Sentenced to an additional 20 years for disparaging Comatose-Americans"

More satire from IMAO:

Zuckerberg Buys Alcatraz Island to House Violators of New Facebook Hate

You can bet these guys will never compliment Chick-Fil-A in public again.


MENLO PARK (AP) – As part of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to have the most aggressive anti-hate speech policy on social media, the billionaire entrepreneur purchased the entire island of Alcatraz, including its prison facilities, with the intention of housing policy violators there.
Zuckerberg explained his decision to finally put some much needed “teeth” into a policy that is often just words and air on other platforms.

“Facebook opposes hate speech,” said Zuckerberg. “Also hate agents, hate statements, hate signals, hate ideologies, hate entities, hate symbols, hate slogans, hate paraphernalia, and neutral statements about the aforementioned hate items. However, until now, all we’ve been able to do is deplatform violators. But then they just go to Gab and go right on hate-speeching, because the stupid government won’t let us control everyone’s speech even though it’d be best for everyone.”

“Then I thought, well, they sure couldn’t do what they wanted if they were in prison. Epiphany! I’ll just buy a prison and put all the people I don’t like in it.”

But where to find a prison? Zuckerberg considered several possibilities. The first of which, a penal colony on Devil’s Island, had recently been taken off the market after being purchased by a former prisoner who’d turned it into a butterfly sanctuary.

Second choice was Gitmo, but after brief consideration, Zuckerberg decided against it.

“Gitmo is already full of falsely accused victims of racism,” Zuckerberg said, “and I didn’t want to traumatize them by putting a bunch of alt-righties in their midst. I couldn’t risk them getting hate-speeched. Which is just like waterboarding, except with words instead of water. They’d probably call it ‘wordboarding.'”

“Finally, though, I decided on Alcatraz,” said Zuckerberg. “San Fran didn’t want to sell because it’s the only place in the Bay area that’s not hip deep in homeless people, but I just shoveled more cash into the back of the ol’ money truck. That did the trick. Man! California politicians just loooove their money!”

Alcatraz’s first inmate of the Facebook era – an unrepentant thug known on the street as “Tiny Tim” – protested the injustice of his 20-year sentence.

“All I said was I hate eggplants. I’m five years old! I hate ALL vegetables!”

As of this writing, Tim had been sentenced to an additional 20 years for disparaging Comatose-Americans.

Zuckerberg faces possible contempt charges in both Canada and Great Britain

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is facing new problems. Graham Kates reports in CBS News,

A committee in Canada's Parliament voted unanimously Tuesday evening to take the rare step of issuing a subpoena demanding appearances from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. Bob Zimmer, chair of Canada's Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, said in a phone call with CBS News that the subpoena can only be enforced if the Facebook executives step foot on Canadian soil.

"We're hoping this shows them we're serious. There are representatives from 10 countries now who want to hear from them," Zimmer said.

The move comes after Zuckerberg ignored repeated requests to address both a Canadian committee investigating disinformation and election meddling on the social media platform, as well as an "International Grand Committee" of legislative investigators from 10 nations set to gather in Ottawa May 28.

If Zuckerberg and Sandberg fail to respond to the subpoena or decline to appear, Zimmer said the committee will ask Parliament to take an extraordinarily unusual measure.

"The next escalation would be to submit to the full Parliament a motion to hold them in contempt," Zimmer said.

If passed, it would be just the sixth time in Canada's history that the House of Commons approved a contempt of Parliament citation.

Canada is now the second country to which Zuckerberg cannot travel without expecting to be immediately summoned to appear before government officials. After the International Grand Committee met for the first time in London last year — a meeting Zuckerberg declined to attend — the head of a British committee investigating disinformation told CBS News that if Zuckerberg ever steps foot in England he can expect a visit from authorities.

"If Mark Zuckerberg came to the U.K., we would serve a summons on him and if he refused to accept that summons then we could start contempt proceedings against him," Damian Collins, the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the U.K. Parliament, said in a February interview.

The International Grand Committee first banded together Nov. 27 after they were stymied in their efforts to question leading tech executives for their separate disinformation investigations. When Zuckerberg didn't show up at that November meeting, he was represented by an empty chair.

Zimmer said the May 28 hearing will include "experts on disinformation from around the world." Confirmed attendees so far include Ellen Weintraub, Chair of the United States Federal Election Commission, Jim Balsillie, founder of Blackberry and Jason Kint, CEO of Content Nex, a trade organization that represents online publishers.

Zuckerberg lied to Congress

Ace of Spades writes today,

Diamond & Silk: Mark Zuckerberg Lied, Facebook Didn't Contact Us
—Ace of Spades
Warning: This post may be Unsafe For the Community.

Popular pro-Trump sisters Diamond and Silk Wednesday night claimed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lied when he told Congress his team had gotten in touch with them to correct an "enforcement error."
Zuckerburg told the House panel this:

"Congressman, in that specific case, our team made an enforcement error and we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it," he testified.

But Diamond and Silk say that never happened:

"No!" the sisters replied in unison, when Ingraham asked [about Facebook contacting them to resolve the sitation]. "We have not been in communication with Facebook. We have not been contacted. We have not spoken with anyone over the phone, so that was a lie," Diamond added.

Pretending to be a stand up guy and claim he wants to fix things: It's tee shirt day in Congress!

Ace of Spades has this to say as Zuckerberg prepares to testify.

Zuckerberg is set to pretend to be a stand-up guy and claim he wants to fix things.

Ahead of the hearing, Zuckerberg posted on Facebook: "In an hour I'm going to testify in front of the Senate about how Facebook needs to take a broader view of our responsibility -- not just to build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good."
Make sure our surveillance tools are "used for good." Fuck you, douchebag.

While Zuckerberg is willing to confess that FaceBook did not properly respond to Cambridge Analytica's data scraping from 2013 to 2015, he fails to note a period of time when a winning political candidate mined FaceBook for personal data with which to target voters: 2008-2012.

I wonder who was data-mining FaceBook user data then, with FaceBook's permission.

I'd like to say I expect Republicans to ask him about this curious omission, but I've come to expect very, very little from them.

When the Obama campaign mined Facebook, it was cool!

Cathy Burke reports at Newsmax,

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should testify before Congress about privacy protections in the wake of revelations data from 50 million users was shared without their knowledge, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Sunday.

Read more here.

Three billionaires who made terrible investments

Ira Stoll writes in the New York Sun,

It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals.

Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin ($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion).

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives of Bezos-Slim- and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.”

Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

...Even if you buy the questionable idea that more expensive news automatically equals better news, it’s a further, and even more tenuous, logical leap from that idea to the notion that Congress ought to interpose itself on one side of a set of business negotiations to make it easier for the publishers to make their news more expensive to consumers, or their ads more expensive to advertisers.

If publishers want to permit competing suppliers to negotiate prices and terms on a cooperative basis, then let them support changing the law to allow it in every industry, without special treatment for journalistic enterprises.

The Google-Facebook world has taken advertising and subscription revenue dollars out of publisher pockets. But it’s been a huge boon to marketers and to readers. Advertisers can now reach targets more efficiently at a fraction of what they used to pay for print ads, and readers can now get news from a variety of sites and editors and journalists, from Matt Drudge to Mike Allen to Glenn Reynolds, rather than having to rely on the judgment of their one hometown newspaper editor.

Not even Congress has the power to turn back that clock to the old days. Nor would anyone with any sense want it to, other than someone lucky (or unlucky) enough to have inherited a newspaper, or foolish enough to have overpaid for one.

Read more here.