Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer
and industrial investors to demand a
huge DACA amnesty
Facebook operates essentially as a dictatorship.Sacha Baron Cohen Calls Silicon Valley ‘Greatest Propaganda Machine in History’ for Hate Groups
3:52
Actor Sacha Baron Cohen railed against social media firms giants including Facebook, Google, and Twitter calling them “the greatest propaganda machine in history” for hate groups.
CNBC reports that British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has blamed tech giants Facebook, Google, and Twitter for boosting the voices of hate groups and spreading fake news during a speech before the Anti-Defamation League this week.
Baron Cohen is best known for playing the lead characters in films such as Borat about a documentary filmmaker from Kazakhstan coming to America, he also portrayed the character of Ali G on Da Ali G Show where he would conduct interviews in character with guests who were often unaware that Baron Cohen was an actor. The actor’s signature style has been to trick the people he interviews into revealing their own biases or convincing them to say offensive things or take part in outrageous scenarios.
But Baron Cohen lashed out at the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley recently during a speech before the ADL. Baron Cohen stated that hate groups and divisive rhetoric are on the rise across the world and blamed Big Tech for acting as “the greatest propaganda machine in history.” He stated during his speech:
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.
Baron Cohen harshly criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who promoted freedom of speech to students during an event at Georgetown University recently. The actor pointed out issues he had with Zuckerberg’s refusal to police speech on the Facebook platform, stating:
If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants [to] kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not! The restaurant owner has every legal right and a moral obligation to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies.
Baron Cohen stated that believes Facebook should be regulated and that there should be an automated delay between the time material is uploaded and it is posted to the platform in order to ensure that violent content is not allowed on the platform. He stated:
There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist. And if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL, insist on facts and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms.
Baron Cohen referred to the CEO’s of Silicon Valley’s biggest firm as “The Silicon Six”, this includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and four executives from Google’s parent company Alphabet: Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
A Twitter spokesperson noted after Baron Cohen’s speech that it had suspended the accounts of 186 hate groups so far. The spokesperson stated: “Our rules are clear: There is no place on Twitter for hateful conduct, terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups.” Facebook, Google, and YouTube did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less
and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and
American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably
believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you
have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call
it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President
George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create
a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest
executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent
since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely
benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in
fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
Bokhari:
Public Humility, Private Arrogance – The Two Faces of Mark Zuckerberg
2 Oct 201910
Ironically for the CEO of a company infamous for its role in destroying
the barrier between private and public life, Mark Zuckerberg’s private and
public personalities seem very different.
In
public, Zuckerberg is all humility. Mark
Zuckerberg: “I’m Really Sorry That This Happened” could
be any headline about a Facebook data scandal in the past two years. His 2018
speech to European politicians was an
apology. His remarks before Congress were an
apology. After the Cambridge Analytica affair, Facebook took out
full-page newspaper ads in ten newspapers, apologizing.
In
private, however, the Facebook CEO sings a different tune, promising defiance
against regulators and politicians, and joking about how he can’t be fired.
In leaked
audio obtained by the Verge, Zuckerberg
pledges to fight against any regulation of big tech pushed by Elizabeth Warren
or any other politician.
That
doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like
Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies
… I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a
legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge….at the
end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that
existential, you go to the mat and you fight.
He
said it was particularly important that Facebook and other big tech companies
aren’t broken up, because only they’re big enough to censor everyone — or stop
“hate speech,” in the Facebook founder’s words.
You
know, [breaking up big tech] doesn’t make election interference less likely. It
makes it more likely because now the companies can’t
coordinate and work together. It doesn’t make any of the hate speech or issues
like that less likely. It makes it more likely because now …
all the processes that we’re putting in place and investing in, now we’re more
fragmented. [emphasis added]
He
also mocked Twitter for not being big enough to censor as efficiently as
Facebook.
It’s
why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face,
qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment.
Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company.
[laughter]
Zuckerberg’s
answer to global scrutiny from national governments? Just ignore them, if
they’re not big enough to matter! (Fun fact, Facebook has revenues greater
than the GDP of Serbia, and would be the 90th-wealthiest
country in the world if it were a country).
I
did hearings in the US. I did hearings in the EU. It just doesn’t really make
sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me
show up and, frankly, doesn’t have jurisdiction to demand that.
Does
the arrogance and the commitment to massive investments to fight “hate speech”
concern you? Too bad — Zuckerberg isn’t going anywhere:
kind
of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early
on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where
I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure…
In
the early days of Facebook, reporters obtained a now-infamous message from
Zuckerberg in which
he mocked the platform’s users as “dumb f**cks” for trusting him with their
personal data.
Insincere
contrition in public, and cavalier arrogance in private. Not much has changed!
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
Report: Mark Zuckerberg Leveraged Facebook User Data to Fight
Rivals and Help Friends
LUCAS NOLAN
16 Apr 20192
3:57
According to a recent report, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used
Facebook user data to fight rivals and help his friends and allies.
NBC
News reports that
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly used Facebook user data as a bargaining
chip to consolidate the social media platform’s power over its competitors,
while publicly proclaiming to protect user privacy. Leaked company documents
obtained by NBC news dated between 2011 and 2015 show how Zuckerberg and his
management team used Facebook’s massive database of user information as
leverage over partnered companies.
The
documents obtained by NBC include emails, webchats, presentations,
spreadsheets, and meeting summaries which show how Facebook would reward
favored companies by giving them greater access to user data. Rival companies
were denied the same access. Facebook has previously denied accusations of
preferential treatment towards particular companies.
According
to the documents, Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data as it was
spending a large amount of money on Facebook advertising and partnering with
Facebook when launching its Fire smartphone. In comparison, when a messaging
app became popular and threatened Facebook’s own messenger app, Facebook
discussed cutting off the app’s access to user data according to the documents.
The
documents come from a previously
reported trove of data obtained by UK Parliament from a startup
called Six4Three which sued Facebook in 2015 after Facebook told the startup
they would be cutting off the startup’s access to some types of user data.
Facebook commented on the documents with the company’s vice president and
deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, stating: “As we’ve said many times,
Six4Three — creators of the Pikinis app — cherry picked these documents from
years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on
friends of the app’s users.”
Grewal
continued: “The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story
and omits important context. We still stand by the platform changes we made in
2014/2015 to prevent people from sharing their friends’ information with
developers like the creators of Pikinis. The documents were selectively leaked
as part of what the court found was evidence of a crime or fraud to publish
some, but not all, of the internal discussions at Facebook at the time of our
platform changes. But the facts are clear: we’ve never sold people’s data.”
Within
the emails, Facebook staff can be seen discussing plans to generate more income
for the company, these include a fixed annual fee for developers for reviewing
their apps; access fees for apps that request user data, and a fee for
“premium” access to user data. Chris Daniels, a Facebook business
development director, wrote in an August 2012 email: “Today the
fundamental trade is ‘data for distribution’ whereas we want to change it to
either ‘data for $’ and/or ‘$ for distribution.’”
Mark
Zuckerberg himself discussed plans with his close friend Sam Lessin in which he
emphasized the importance of controlling third-party apps’ access to user data.
Zuckerberg stated that without the leverage of data access “I don’t think
we have any way to get developers to pay us at all.” In another email,
Zuckerberg suggested making 100 deals with developers “as a path to
figuring out the real market value” of Facebook user data and then “setting a
public rate” for other developers to pay.
Zuckerberg
stated in a chat: “The goal here wouldn’t be the deals themselves, but
that through the process of negotiating with them we’d learn what developers
would actually pay (which might be different from what they’d say if we just
asked them about the value), and then we’d be better informed on our path to
set a public rate.”
Zuckerberg
also did not appear to be very worried by the potential privacy risks of
Facebook’s data sharing plans stating in an email to Lessin: “I’m
generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as you
think. I think we leak info to developers but I just can’t think of any
instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a
real issue for us.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of
free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
BARACK
OBAMA POSITIONS MARK ZUCKERBERG of FAKEBOOK to be his global controller of
propaganda for the Obama bankster funded third term for life.
http://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/09/fakebooks-mark-zuckerberg-will-be.html
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to
serve the rich in America’s open borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/em-cadwaladr-impending-death-of.html
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Marlow: Tech Monopolies Are Trying
to Beat Trump in 2020 by Shutting Down ‘Voices to the Voiceless’
PAM KEY
17 Apr 20192,251
2:50
Wednesday on Fox
News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said big technology
monopolies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Wikipedia were
attempting to “censor the outlets that might give voices to the voiceless.”
Partial
transcript is as follows:
CARLSON:
So, what does it mean in practical terms that Wikipedia users can no longer use
Breitbart as a citation?
MARLOW:
I think in practical terms, what it means is that people who access Wikipedia
as a source are only going to get establishment media outlets to source their
claims. We know those claims, they treat full-on-hoaxes as fact. They have
missed the seminal stories of our time — starting with the immigration crisis,
which we started reporting on in conservative media, particularly Breitbart,
2014, 2015. They missed the Brexit narrative. They missed the narrative that
the establishment and our media and political classes and the coastal elite
losing touch with the working men and women in flyover county. They missed
that. They missed the election of Donald Trump, and now —
CARLSON:
Not a big thing.
MARLOW:
A minor thing they totally air-balled, and now a year-and-a-half, maybe
two-and-half years arguably, into the Russia hoax, this is their Jonestown, the
media. This is their mass suicide effort. Will it be treated like that? No!
Because they are a bubbled elite, and now they treat themselves as if they will
always be correct.
CARLSON:
What is so interesting is not just that they are evading all responsibility for
what they did — for the lies they told and the distortions that really wrecked
our foreign policy among other things, but that they are trying to suppress
other news outlets which told the truth. How Orwellian is that?
MARLOW:
You nailed it here. They are not only suppressing us — and they target you,
they target us, they will target just about all of us right of center and who
serve a right-of-center audience, not because we are getting things wrong.
They’re targeting us because we are getting things right. We got these key
stories right, and we will probably get the next key stories right. And they’re
doing it in a methodical way. It started with Google kind of toying with the
searches, which you have been good at reporting on with Dr. Robert Epstein.
Twitter with shadow-banning, which we broke at Breitbart. It was called a hoax
at the time, turns out it wasn’t. Facebook had to changed their algorithm
because places like Breitbart were dominating. And it goes on. Wikipedia
kicking us out, it shows up every time you use Google and Facebook, they rely
on Wikipedia. This is methodical, and they will continue to expand this.
Microsoft is now in the blacklisting game. They team with this group called
NewsGuard, which of course, they sanction all the places that got the Russia
hoax wrong, and they treat places like Breitbart and even the Drudge Report as
fake news. It is ridiculous. And they will continue. Next its going to be
de-banking. They are going to decapitalize people not just with right-of-center
world views, they are doing this with people who want a pipeline, want to work
in the energy sector, and aren’t woke fascists who want the Green New Deal.
It’s insane.
CARLSON:
Since free speech is dying and it is not government killing it but big
monopolies, sanctioned by government, do you know anyone in government who
might be able to save free speech for the republic? Why is nobody doing
anything about this?
MARLOW:
I don’t know. And that is exactly the question I was hoping you would ask,
because I do hope this is the most-powerful audience in all of news, and I
think it would be great if the powerful people watching it understand that this
is the battle. They are trying to win the 2020 election by shutting down and
censoring the outlets that might give voices to the voiceless — the people
disenfranchised.
CARLSON:
Do you really think you are going to get reelected president if nobody can hear
your message?
MARLOW:
Absolutely. They see this crystal clear, and that is why they’re trying to shut
down you and me.
Follow
Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer
and industrial investors to demand a
huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are
continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens
in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border
wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
THE
BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"GOP
estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-
collar
cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that
salaries
are too damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS
LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman
Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan
Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American
Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google
CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook
OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart
BARACK OBAMA’S CONSPIRACY FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE
First, destroy Trump and put Hillary away.
HE PARTNERS WITH ZUCKERBERG, SOROS AND LOUIS FARRAKHAN
AS WALL STREET PLUNDERS: A Nation of One Million
Homeless and Overrun By Mexico’s Export of “cheap labor”!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/04/wall-street-plunders-ceo-pay-banksters.html
Hollywood
Producer Channing Powell ‘Terrified’ of Big Tech’s Future
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images
TOM
CICCOTTA
Hollywood producer Channing Powell is getting ready to premiere The Feed, a new television show that channels her fears about the threat of big tech companies.
Channing Powell, creator of the hit TV show The Walking Dead, has created a
new television show about a real-world fear. This time, Powell’s new show will
focus on a society that has been overtaken by massive technology companies,
much like those that are incubating in Silicon Valley today.
“We have seen dystopian shows before but never like
this. It was a very realistic portrayal of what happens when we let technology
control us — and we are heading in that direction,” Powell said. “We cannot let
go of our iPhones, we need to check Instagram every hour or minute. The notion
that you would put something inside your head is really frightening to me,” she
finished.
Powell says that Elon Musk’s call for government
regulation of Silicon Valley is a sign that big tech companies pose a
threat to society if they are left unchecked.
“What is happening around us right now is so scary.
When somebody like Elon Musk (a radical libertarian) — who is inside this — is
telling the government, ‘You need to regulate us, and stop us from doing what
we are doing’, that is terrifying. Because he knows way more than we know,” she
added.
In Powell’s new show, which is called The Feed, a small group of
powerful people control the computer code that runs society. The Feed will ironically
premiere on Amazon’s video streaming platform later this year.
Some analysts argue that society is not far away from
being controlled by technology firms. Breitbart News reported this week that
Amazon employees regularly violate the
privacy of their users who own Amazon Echo devices.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this
story.
Facebook shareholders are getting fed up with
Zuckerberg but can’t do anything about him
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he prepared to testify
on Capitol Hill in 2018. (Andrew Harnik / AP)
Judging from the proxy statement issued by Facebook last week in advance of its May 30 annual meeting, the company’s
shareholders are starting to get fed up with its leadership by co-founder,
Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Four shareholder proposals on the proxy ballot call
for slicing away at Zuckerberg’s authority over Facebook.
“Facebook operates essentially as a dictatorship,”
observes the supporting statement for one of those proposals. “Shareholders
cannot call special meetings and have no right to act by written consent. A
supermajority vote is required to amend certain bylaws. Our Board is locked
into an out-dated governance structure that reduces board accountability to
shareholders.”
One of the four proposals would establish an
independent chair, instead of leaving the chair and CEO positions both in
Zuckerberg’s hands. Another would require majority votes for directors, so they
couldn’t skate into their board positions purely on Zuckerberg’s say-so. The
third would call for all shares, whether Class A or Class B, to have a single
vote. A fourth calls for the board to consider “strategic alternatives”
including a breakup of the company.
Facebook operates essentially as a
dictatorship.
FACEBOOK SHAREHOLDER
PROPOSAL, 2019
Share quote & link
Here’s my prediction of how these votes will go: Every
one will be overwhelmingly defeated.
This requires not a crystal ball, but merely a working
knowledge of arithmetic. Zuckerberg owns or controls 88.1% of Facebook’s Class
B shares, which each have 10 votes at the annual meeting — 3.98 billion votes
overall. There are only 2.4 billion Class A shares, which are the only shares
ordinary investors can buy. So any proposal Zuckerberg doesn’t like will fail
by nearly a 2-1 margin, assuming all Class A investors vote together, which
never happens. (Zuckerberg owns 0.5% of the Class A shares.)
And that’s how all previous proposals like these have
fared. Facebook observes in its opposition statements to the four proposals
that “our stockholders” rejected the voting change at each of the last five
annual meetings and the chair/CEO split at last year’s.
MAR 26,
2018 | 12:35 PM
This statement is a model of corporate cynicism, if
it’s meant to imply that Zuckerberg is loved and admired by the entire
shareholder base (as it is) — similar to the claim of a Third World dictator
that his citizens adore him because he regularly racks up 90% majorities on
election day.
There are indications that most outside shareholders
would like to see a change in the management structure. According to the support statement for the
proposal to split the chairman and CEO posts by its sponsor, Trillium Asset
Management, a similar proposal received 51% of the votes, not counting board
members and other insiders such as Zuckerberg.
Nevertheless, Facebook gives all the governance
proposals the back of its hand, advocating a “no” vote on all four. “We believe
that our capital structure is in the best interests of our stockholders and
that our current corporate governance structure is sound and effective,” the
company stated in opposition to the proposal to equalize share votes.
“The vision and leadership of our founder and CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg, has guided us from our inception,” the company added, sounding
like the officiant at a church service.
None of this, of course, can come as a surprise.
Zuckerberg’s unassailable control of Facebook has been in place since even
before its 2012 initial public offering; the IPO merely cemented that control into
the by-laws. As I advised investors who
managed to snag a few shares during that much-touted IPO, “Congratulations.
You're now married to Mark Zuckerberg.”
MAY 02,
2018 | 10:35 AM
That seemed to be an ideal marriage for much of the
following few years, but it’s hardly unusual for even the most heavenly
marriages to burst a seam after a time. In corporate governance, the issue is
usually money (as in real-life marriages). Facebook’s shares consistently have
produced a handsome return for shareholders, which keeps their grousing to a
minimum. This year, the shares have gained about 33%. But they’re also trading
at about 18% below their 52-week high, which evidently makes some holders
wonder if their investment is in the best hands.
To justify installing an independent chair, Trillium
lists some missteps Zuckerberg has overseen during his monarchical reign. They
include facilitating Russian meddling in U.S. elections, allowing the personal
data of 87 million users to be accessed by Cambridge Analytica, allowing the
proliferation of fake news and “propagating violence in Myanmar, India, and
South Sudan,” and “allowing advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other
‘ethnic affinities’ from seeing ads.”
That’s a partial list. Zuckerberg’s arrogance, an
offshoot of his unassailable position, is palpable. It accounts for Facebook’s
chronic insensitivity to its users’ privacy needs, and the trouble the company
has gotten into with the Federal Trade Commission and European regulators.
Checks on Zuckerberg’s whims almost never arise. One
teachable moment came in 2016, when Facebook proposed creating a third class of
stock, with no voting rights whatsoever. Zuckerberg pretended that this idea
had been cooked up by the board of directors so he and his wife could give away
their Facebook shares to charity without losing voting control, but of course
the board of directors is effectively him.
The shareholder vote at the 2016 annual meeting came
in overwhelmingly in Zuckerberg’s favor, but he eventually abandoned the plan anyway, thanks to
the furious reaction from outside shareholders and a shareholder lawsuit over
the plan that was about to go to trial when Zuckerberg bailed.
But that’s an outlier. In almost every other
particular, Zuckerberg’s position wins. One can admire the persistence of the
shareholders who fight every year to defeat him at the annual meeting, but
their efforts are a modern-day definition of “quixotic.” Of course, they knew
that when they bought their shares, so what do they really have to complain
about?
Michael Hiltzik
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik
writes a daily blog appearing on latimes.com. His business column appears in
print every Sunday, and occasionally on other days. As a member of the Los
Angeles Times staff, he has been a financial and technology writer and a
foreign correspondent. He is the author of six books, including “Dealers of
Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age” and “The New Deal:
A Modern History.” Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer
Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
Will Americans vote in
2020 to surrender our freedom?
I had the opportunity to see the
movie The
Invisibles, a
German-made film depicting the real life stories of four Holocaust-survivors
who disguised their true Jewish identities in wartime Berlin and were able to
escape deportation to concentration camps and certain death. In
1943, Joseph Goebbels declared that Berlin was finally rid of the
Jews. The facts were that 7,000 Jews continued to live in the city,
and by the end of the war, a total of 1,500 had survived with the assistance of
a select group of anti-Nazi citizens, devout Christians, and devoted
communists. The movie is based on the true stories of four of these
individuals and mixes re-enactment of their harrowing individual stories with real-life
interviews of all four of these survivors to add authenticity to the narrative.
There was much to learn while watching the
various episodes and stories of the four survivors, especially when they came
to directly encounter the German authorities. What I noted was how
highly organized the Nazi government officials depicted in the movie were and
how they had access to comprehensive records on every citizen they interacted
with. The Nazis were excellent at keeping records as a means of
maintaining widespread total control over their population.
Index cards containing extensive personal
information of each of the four main characters and other people who attempted
to assist them were readily available and used by the German officials at any
time in the movie in a threatening way when interacting with any of
them. Information was controlled in this highly powerful and evil
totalitarian state simply by a system based on pen and paper, with the
assistance of a virtual army of loyal and highly motivated bureaucrats. How
much more tragic would this this era have been if the Nazis had access to
computers, the internet, mobile communications, search engines, and social
media?
In our times, the government of the
People's Republic of China under the increasingly totalitarian rule of Xi
Jinping does. President Xi Jinping is leading a long-term movement
of enhancing the control of the Chinese Communist Party over every aspect of
China's society, from politics to business, and even more alarmingly by
establishing a high degree of social control over the personal lives of its
citizens. The difference today is that the Chinese state security
system is enhancing the ability to maintain social control through the use of
the latest in 21st-century technology.
China's digital totalitarian experiment
that is currently actively under development since 2010 is called the Social
Credit System. Its objective is to use the latest technology to
constantly monitor individuals for the purposes of social management. is based
on the idea that an individual must be socially trustworthy to remain a citizen
in good standing in China, and every citizen is subject to rewards and
punishment administered by the state for compliance or non-compliance.
On a daily basis, Chinese government
agencies and private companies are collecting information via electronic means
on various networks and their versions of social media on every aspect of
people's lives, including finances, social media activities, taxes paid,
purchases made online, and records of a person's interactions with others.
A lower social credit score can negatively
influence a citizen's life in various ways such as limiting his ability to
purchase certain premium goods, buy a new home, work at certain jobs, qualify
for various loans, buy tickets to travel, or attend sought after
schools. The system is morphing into totalitarianism on steroids.
Socialism seems to have a greater degree
of appeal to certain segments of our society, including many potential
Democratic Party voters and younger voters such as Millennials. So far, all the
announced presidential candidates for the 2020 election on the Democratic side
are moving politically leftward in their pronounced policy
positions. Today, the potential for all of this goes well beyond the
standard Democratic Party policy agenda based on the Utopian fantasies of free
everything for everybody.
It is inevitable as a socialist agenda in
this country is started to be implemented it will evolve over time and morph
into something increasingly more draconian in nature. The Democratic
candidate's proposals ultimately involve controlling the behavior of
individuals for the social good to be defined by a growing administrative state
and unelected bureaucrats based in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere with the
power to curb any dissent and unauthorized behavior. The emerging
world of technological innovation and social media provides powerful tools to
assume absolute power over time.
As demonstrated by the Nazi Regime and the
Chinese communist examples, Big Government requires the collection and use of
Big Data. Socialism requires extensive record-keeping in order to
implement its far-reaching agenda that extends the scope of government and its
reach toward the extensive regulation of the lives of all citizens.
While today the Chinese government and its
Communist Party are actively working on creating an absolute monopoly on access
to personal information in their country, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other
social media companies are attempting to do the same here in America.
As Google, Amazon, and Facebook grow in
power and reach ever larger numbers of users in America and globally, they have
become increasingly active in the political arena. A major issue
with this growing phenomenon is that these dominant and most influential of the
social media companies tend to aggressively promote a predominantly
left-leaning political point of view on a daily basis in various ways, and they
are alleged by many critics to suppress politically conservative individuals
and viewpoints.
As we approach the 2020 elections, will
Americans voluntarily surrender our freedom by choosing to vote for
increasingly left-leaning Democrat candidates who will promise to lead us down
the path of socialism and to implement a political system that proposes to
regulate and judge the social responsibility of each of its
citizens? It must be repeated that Adolf Hitler was elected by the
German people in the 1930s to a position where he could eventually assume
absolute power and implement his plan for a totalitarian state.
Will we vote in 2020 for an American
future that will one day allow the possibility for a person to go online to
read his favorite magazines, bloggers, books; watch his preferred TV shows and
movies; make travel plans; interact with certain people — and, by his actions
and choices, be subject to a long prison sentence or worse?
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