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 private, however, the Facebook CEO sings a different tune, promising defiance against regulators and politicians, and joking about how he can’t be fired.
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…
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.
TECH BILLIONAIRE SHITBAG!
ZUCKERBERG IS A MAJOR DONOR TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA "The Race" NOW CALLING ITSELF UNIDOSus.
Report: Mark Zuckerberg Leveraged Facebook User Data to Fight Rivals and Help Friends
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 @LucasNo lan 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.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
“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’
17 Apr 2019 2,251
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.
*
Only a complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
*
“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
*
The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.
*
Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
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!
"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”!
Hollywood Producer Channing Powell ‘Terrified’ of Big Tech’s Future
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
12 Apr 201939
1:55
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 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 The Feed
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment