America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Monday, October 25, 2021
NEO-FASCIST MARK ZUCKERBERG - I ELECTED JOE BIDEN FOR OPEN BORDERS, CHEAP LABOR AND TO PROTECT FACEBOOK FROM ANTI-TRUST
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Facebook today in a comment to Breitbart News, arguing that it is playing favorites with political parties in the United States and should lose its Section 230 protections as a consequence.
“Facebook has been intentionally suppressing traffic to Breitbart,” said Sen. Cotton in a statement.
MANDEL NGAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., interrupts a fellow senator during a confirmation hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee for CIA nominee Gina Haspel, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, May 9, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“Not because of policy violations, but to protect liberal politicians. Any company that acts like a wing of the Democratic Party should not enjoy Section 230 protections.”
The Arkansas senator made the comment in a statement to Breitbart News following the bombshell news that Facebook introduced tools after the 2016 election that slashed traffic to conservative publishers.
The company introduced two tools after the 2016 election that disproportionately harmed conservative publishers. The Journal highlights internal Facebook research showing that if both tools were removed, it would increase traffic to Breitbart News by 20 percent, the Washington Times by 18 percent, Western Journal by 16 percent, and the Epoch Times by 11 percent. Facebook eventually removed one of the tools while keeping the other — but it is unclear which of them had the most impact on traffic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Facebook’s researchers feared, “We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers.”
The story also revealed that Breitbart News is relegated to a “second tier” of the platform’s News Tab, where it gets less exposure than its corporate establishment competitors. On top of this, Facebook is directly paying Breitbart News’s competitors, establishment media conglomerates including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journaland the New York Times — while offering no such compensation to Breitbart News.
The news emerged in a story from the Wall Street Journal, which shed new light on both Facebook’s censorship of conservatives, and the ceaseless agitation on the part of its left-wing employees for more punishment of Breitbart News and other conservative pages.
According to a recent report, investors are beginning to harness AI and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the voices of corporate CEOs and management teams to determine whether they’re being truthful or not.
Reuters reports that investors are beginning to utilize artificial intelligence to learn and analyze the language patterns of company managers and CEOs in order to determine if they’re being truthful. This technique has already been used by investors as an additional data point when making investment decisions.
Evan Schnidman, a language pattern software specialist, says that in late 2020 executives in the tech industry claimed that fears of a semiconductor chip shortage were unfounded. But according to algorithmic analysis of their voices, the executives displayed signs of uncertainty. Schnidman, who acted as a consultant to the two fintech companies behind the analysis, commented: “We found that IT sector executives’ tone was inconsistent with the positive textual sentiment of their remarks.”
Not long after executives assured investors that no chip shortage was imminent, companies worldwide began warning of a severe shortage of chips being produced and share prices in auto and industrial firms fell.
Investors are beginning to see the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology as a cutting-edge tool to get an advantage over their rivals. Reuters interviewed 11 fund managers, all of which stated that they are trialing similar systems. The funds stated that traditional financial data and corporate statements are so heavily mined that they offer little value.
Reuters spoke to Slavi Marinov, the head of machine learning at Man AHL, which is part of the $135 billion investment management firm Man Group. Marino stated that NLP was “one of the major research areas of focus,” at the fund. “These models transform something that is very messy to something that is easily understandable by a quant,” he said.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
Report: Facebook Suppressed Breitbart News Traffic by Twenty Percent
The Wall Street Journal has published internal material from anonymous sources at Facebook revealing that the company introduced tools that suppressed the traffic of Breitbart News by 20 percent, and other conservative publishers by double-digit margins.
The company introduced two tools after the 2016 election that disproportionately harmed conservative publishers. The Journal highlights internal Facebook research showing that if both tools were removed, it would increase traffic to Breitbart News by 20 percent, the Washington Times by 18 percent, Western Journal by 16 percent, and the Epoch Times by 11 percent. Facebook eventually removed one of the tools while keeping the other — but it is unclear which of them had the most impact on traffic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Facebook’s researchers feared, “We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers.”
The story also revealed that Breitbart News is relegated to a “second tier” of the platform’s News Tab, where it gets less exposure than its corporate establishment competitors. On top of this, Facebook is directly paying Breitbart News’s competitors, establishment media conglomerates including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journaland the New York Times — while offering no such compensation to Breitbart News.
Despite Facebook’s favoritism and financial support of its establishment competitors, Breitbart News continues to be wildly popular with Facebook’s users. In August, data from Facebook-owned social media analytics company Crowdtangle showed Breitbart News demolishes its competitors in generating engagement from Facebook’s users. The data showed Breitbart earned more Facebook engagement than TheNew York Times, the Washington Post, and HuffPo combined. Breitbart surpassed the Wall Street Journal and CNN by healthy margins as well.
Clearly, Breitbart News is popular with Facebook users. But the choices of Facebook users do not appear to matter that much to Facebook’s employees. The internal discussions leaked to the Journal reveal employees who skew even more left than the company’s liberal upper management. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s arguably pivotal efforts to put Joe Biden in the White House, Facebook’s token tolerance of some conservative publishers is considered intolerable by some employees, no matter how popular those publishers are with users.
In this Oct. 25, 2019, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the Paley Center in New York. Facebook on Wednesday, July 14, 2021, is asking that the new head of the Federal Trade Commission step away from antitrust investigations into the social network giant, asserting that her past public criticism of the company’s market power makes it impossible for her to be impartial. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
The concerns have little to do with the accuracy of Breitbart News stories and much to do with their political perspective. The first three Breitbart articles mentioned by the Wall Street Journal as concerning to Facebook employees were factually accurate headlines about violent protests in the summer: “Minneapolis Mayhem: Riots in Masks,” “Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires!” and “BLM Protesters Pummel Police Cars on 101.”
If accuracy in news reporting were the top issue for Facebook employees, the establishment media’s attempts to cover up and downplay the violence (like CNN’s infamous “mostly peaceful protests” chyron) should have caused greater controversy. Instead, the far-left employees targeted Breitbart News.
In a discussion thread called “Get Breitbart out of News Tab,” the company’s employees brainstormed new policies that would see Breitbart News ejected from the feature, which distributes news stories to users from a curated list of websites while maintaining the appearance of neutrality. One employee suggested removing websites that saw their internal “trust score” (as measured by Facebook) decline, but expressed concern that the policy might also affect CNN.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, Facebook already punishes Breitbart News in relation to its competitors by relegating it to a “second tier” of the News Tab, which only delivers news tailored to user’s interests. In other words, only users who are already interested in content similar to Breitbart’s will receive its stories, limiting Breitbart’s ability to reach new readers.
Relegating Breitbart News to the second tier is not the only way Facebook suppresses conservatives. It also deliberately suppressed the influence of its most active and engaged users, most likely because those users favored conservative news.
“Sparing Sharing” and “Informed Engagement” were both introduced by Facebook after the 2016 election as part of an effort to curb so-called misinformation. The first tool reduced the spread of posts shared by Facebook’s most engaged users, aka “hyperposters,” a group Breitbart News is popular with. The second reduced the spread of content shared without reading it.
These are the two tools that, according to Facebook’s own research, suppressed traffic to Breitbart News by 20 percent.
Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, testifies remotely during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election” on November 17, 2020, in Washington, DC. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are scheduled to testify remotely. (Photo By Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Images)
Facebook eventually scrapped the second tool, “Informed Engagement,” but kept Sparing Sharing, which continued to punish the site’s most engaged users.
While the anonymous Facebook employees quoted in the Journal insist that the company should further suppress Breitbart News or eject it from the News Tab (where it is already relegated to the “second tier”), they provide little evidence of inaccuracy in Breitbart’s reporting.
The only recent example cited by the Journalis of Facebook punishing Breitbart News for livestreaming a news conference of doctors convening in Washington, DC, to discuss their thoughts on at-the-time unproven off-label drug use options for COVID treatment. Like any live event, this one, which included prominent doctors and a member of Congress, was impossible to edit or “fact check” in real time while it was happening.
The Wall Street Journal also highlights a mysterious “Facebook internal trust rating,” prepared by Facebook researchers. The Journal claims it shows Breitbart to be the least trusted news source in the U.S. and U.K., although it actually shows Breitbart News to be level with various establishment media publications in normalized average surveyed trust.
TheWall Street Journal provides just one slide from the internal study and no details about its methodology, who was surveyed, how their opinions were weighted, or who led the survey. In other words, the Wall Street Journal failed to verify the soundness of the methodology before publishing, or, if it did, chose to conceal it from readers. If the methodology is sound, why withhold it?
The slide also puts far-left outlets like Rolling Stone in the “trusted” quadrant, despite the magazine’s long history of publishing hoaxes, including a recent fake story about ivermectin overdose cases flooding Oklahoma hospitals, and the infamous 2014 UVA rape hoax.
Multiple outlets in the top quadrant, including CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, and the New York Times pushed the discredited Russiagate and Ukrainegate hoaxes throughout the Trump years. In 2020, The Atlantic, now owned by left-wing billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, also published a bogus, still-unsubstantiated story based on anonymous sources claiming President Donald Trump called fallen soldiers “losers.” The Atlantic is set to lose $10 million this year after a $20 million loss last year.
What is clear from the Facebook survey is that people who trust The Atlantic and CNN do not trust Breitbart. This is not shocking news.
The Wall Street Journal’s story shows that opposition to Breitbart News within Facebook is not driven by concerns about it being unpopular or distrusted by users, or its stories being more inaccurate than establishment publishers.
No, the main concern of Facebook employees is that Breitbart News stories make their favorite political causes look bad.
A man stands on top of a burning police car during a protest on May 29, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. Demonstrations are being held across the US after George Floyd died in police custody on May 25th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
In a “racial justice” chat board in the wake of the George Floyd riots last summer, pro-censorship Facebook employees complained that Breitbart News painted Black Lives Matter “in a very negative light,” but did not show any evidence that Breitbart News’s reporting was false or inaccurate.
To the contrary, the Facebook employee showed a series of screenshots of Breitbart News stories that were entirely accurate: “Minneapolis Mayhem: Riots in Masks,” “Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires!” and “BLM Protestors Pummel Police Cars on 101.”
It was not the quality or accuracy of these stories that concerned the Facebook employee. On the contrary, the Facebook employee was upset that the information was accurate, and that Breitbart News dared bring it to public attention. Despite being true, and, indeed, because they were true, the stories painted BLM in a “very negative light.”
The unspoken assumption behind the Facebook employee’s argument is that news organizations that do not deliberately downplay or ignore stories that make Black Lives Matter look bad should not be allowed on the News Tab.
Although Mark Zuckerberg has told congress that broad changes to Facebook’s policies and technology are not designed to censor conservatives, that appears to be precisely the motivation behind changes suggested by Facebook employees in the “racial justice” group, including a suggestion to remove sources from the News Tab if their “trust” score begins to decline.
The Facebook employee who raised the idea suggested such a policy could remove Breitbart News from the News Tab, but worried that it might also result in CNN being removed. In other words, the Facebook employee sought a policy that mostly harmed Breitbart, and not other news organizations, while appearing to apply to all — a policy just like “Sparing Sharing.”
In testimony before Congress in 2018, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Silicon Valley, where his company is based, is an “extremely left leaning place.” The San Francisco bay area regularly tops lists of the most liberal cities in America, and over 75 percent of donations from Facebook employees went to Democrats in the last cycle.
The most leftist employees at Facebook, therefore, are the extreme minority of an already-extreme minority.
These are people who hold views far to the left of average Americans. They are offended by the very suggestion that the mass terror that was perpetrated on American cities last summer in the name of “racial justice” might have been “negative.” They think mainstream political viewpoints, shared by large numbers of people on their platform, are “hateful” and “far right.” And yet this tiny, extreme, ideological bubble gets to control a platform that 36 percent of Americans rely on for news.
With Democrats in charge of the House, Senate, and White House, it appears that disgruntled leftists at Facebook believe the moment has come to start leaking.
Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on Capitol Hill, October 5, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by DREW ANGERER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
That much was made clear by the Frances Haugen debacle, a Facebook “whistleblower,” backed by leftist billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who did little but demand government censorship of the platform, with her in charge of it.
Having done all they can to push for censorship internally at Facebook, the company’s most leftist employees now want to generate external pressure as well, including the threat of new legislation and regulatory action. The ultimate goal, as it has ever been, is more censorship of conservatives.
Conservatives who post on Facebook know that the site routinely censors their content. Now, though, whistleblowers are offering concrete proof confirming what conservatives have intuitively understood: One of the most important vehicles for modern communication has lots of employees who hate conservatives and their ideas.
Three things routinely happen to conservatives on Facebook: (1) Facebook rejects entirely something they post because it violates Facebook’s “community guidelines.” Efforts to get that decision reviewed always fail. (2) Facebook has allowed people to post something, only to slap it with a “disputed” or “fact checked” label. (3) There’s the infamous “sensitive content” label:
However, when conservatives complain about these common censorship maneuvers, they’re told that they’re imagining it. It doesn’t happen because of bias, they’re told. Instead, it’s simply that conservative content is less accurate than that from the more careful and honest progressive outlets. (Please, ignore the entire Russia hoax.)
The Wall Street Journal, however, reports that conservatives are neither paranoid nor imagining things. Facebook’s employees—most of whom are fairly recent college grads—are determined to silence conservatives and resist management pleas to be more even-handed. We know this because a whistleblower leaked internal chat boards, allowing us to see their discussions in real-time:
Many Republicans, from Mr. Trump down, say Facebook discriminates against conservatives. The documents reviewed by the Journal didn’t render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall. They do show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file. The documents viewed by the Journal, which don’t capture all of the employee messaging, didn’t mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.
Other documents also reveal that Facebook’s management team has been so intently focused on avoiding charges of bias that it regularly places political considerations at the center of its decision making.
Facebook employees, as seen in a large quantity of internal message-board conversations, have agitated consistently for the company to act against far-right sites.
One of the ways the employees on the chat board justify censoring conservatives, says the WSJ, is through the claim that conservative sites push misinformation or hate speech. The problem is that it’s leftists who define those terms. Is it hate speech to say “All lives matter”? It is if you’re on the left. Is it misinformation to say that transgenderism is a mental disorder, not a biological, physical reality? Again, it is if you’re on the left.
Likewise, is it hate speech to say that Democrats are inviting illegal aliens in to change American electoral demographics? Again, to the leftists, it is if you’re Tucker Carlson; it isn’t if you’re Joe Biden. And is it misinformation if you say that January 6 was just another protest and one that was less significant than the violence, looting, and murder BLM and Antifa visited on America in 2020, as opposed to the Democrat narrative calling grannies in the Capitol an “insurrection”? Again, it is if you’re a leftist.
And of course, anything involving deviation from the leftist COVID and vaccine narrative is “misinformation.” It’s irrelevant that conservatives have consistently been proven right about the failure of lockdowns and masks, the damage lockdowns and masks do to children, the survivability of COVID, and the danger and ineffectiveness of indiscriminate mass vaccinations.
In other words, young leftists are incapable of distinguishing between subjective and objective reality. This leaves them arguing that anything that comes from conservatives is automatically hate speech or misinformation because they disagree with it. No wonder Facebook employees are obsessed with Breitbart, which is loud and proud about conservativism.
After a staffer asked about removing Breitbart, a senior researcher responded, “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” he wrote.
By 2020, Facebook had begun keeping track of “strikes” for content deemed false by third-party fact-checkers. Repeat offenders could be suspended from posting. Escalations came more frequently against conservative outlets, according to the report.
Attorney General Merrick Garland let Hunter Biden off the hook in a Senate hearing Thursday by not committing to appointing a special counsel to investigate and prosecute President Joe Biden’s son for corrupt business dealings.
When Garland was asked by Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) if he will “appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden,” the attorney general responded he would take Buck’s request “under advisement” but not consideration.
Paintings by Hunter Biden are seen as Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) questions Attorney General Merrick Garland about price fixing during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing of the Department of Justice on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images).
“Apparently I just received the letter today from you, and we’ll be taking it under advisement,” Garland said, noting Buck sent the demand letter Thursday.
Buck’s letter to Garland is about Hunter’s corrupt business dealings includes Hunter’s money transfers in which President Biden may be entangled.
Hunter is reportedly invested in a foreign entity named Skaneateles, which is believed to have “access to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for Chinese and global investments and set up a complicated web of China-based and Cayman Island shell companies and subsidiaries.”
It is now apparent that President Biden could be directly implicated in the ongoing investigations into his son’s money transfers and dealings, raising serious questions regarding whether then Vice President Joe Biden was aware of and possibly benefitted from the influence peddling operation led by his son.
It is now more critical than ever to appoint a special counsel who can lead this investigation in an impartial way. As outlined in 28 CFR § 600, the attorney general has the right to appoint a special counsel to investigate and prosecute matters and individuals that present a conflict of interest for the department when it is in the public interest.
Allowing the investigation to continue to be handled according to the normal practices of the department means that Senate-confirmed political appointees who can only be removed from office by the president are now overseeing an investigation into his son’s, and possibly his, financial dealings related to a prior, or possibly ongoing, influence-peddling scheme.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also questioned Garland on Hunter’s corrupt business dealing. Grassley asked if Garland had spoken to the president about Hunter’s “tax affairs,” which the FBI and IRS are currently investigating.
“I have not,” Garland replied. “The president made abundantly clear in every public statement… that decisions… will be left to the Justice Department. That was the reason I was willing to take on this job.”
In 2020, the Justice Department opened a criminal case into Hunter for alleged money laundering. Breitbart News reported the FBI had possession of Hunter’s laptop hard drive “containing thousands of Hunter Biden’s emails where he discussed his international business dealings.”
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