{"id":90453,"date":"2021-11-02T17:05:43","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T15:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90453"},"modified":"2021-11-02T13:40:24","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T11:40:24","slug":"06-05-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90453","title":{"rendered":"The Facebook Whistleblower Op"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Facebook Whistleblower Op<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nLEE SMITH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Frances Haugen, the Facebook \u2018whistleblower,\u2019 speaks during a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., 2021JABIN BOTSFORD\/THE WASHINGTON POST\/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The latest effort to censor information damaging to Democrats and the oligarchs they serve masquerades as concern for teenage girls.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

.<\/p>\n

Why is everyone waging war on Facebook? If you read the major papers or watch network news, you know that the story began with the emergence of a high-level whistleblower, whose widely publicized revelations shook the tech company\u2014and the concerned membership of the U.S. Senate\u2014to its core. The narrative unfolded like a Hollywood drama, its lead a courageous young woman trying to make the world a better place, only to get caught up in the machinations of a large corporation that threatened not only the health of all young women but also American democracy itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The star is Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old former employee of the social media company who passed thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the Securities Exchange Commission and the press. The previously unknown data engineer testified last month in a Senate hearing (titled \u201cProtecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d) two days after her public debut on\u00a060 Minutes<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/em>. She says she doesn\u2019t hate her former employer but just wants it to be better\u2014to stop using algorithms that make teenage girls feel bad about their bodies, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Haugen\u2019s concern for Facebook\u2019s effect on children tugged at heartstrings on both sides of the Senate aisle. \u201cWe can have social media that brings out the best in humanity,\u201d she posted on her personal website.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That would be nice. But Haugen\u2019s work at Facebook had nothing to do with improving the human condition or helping teenage girls through the difficulties of adolescence. She joined the company in 2019\u00a0reportedly<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0on the condition that she be assigned to its civic integrity unit, responsible for tracking \u201cmisinformation\u201d concerning the 2020 election. Most famously, the unit censored preelection reports of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that gave evidence of his financial arrangements with corrupt foreign officials and businesses. Labeled \u201cmisinformation\u201d and banned from Facebook and other social media sites a month before the election, the information turned out to be entirely real.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Haugen is not an independent whistleblower fighting to rein in the excesses of big tech. Her\u00a0job<\/a>\u00a0was to censor information damaging to the American oligarchy\u2019s political instrument, the Democratic Party. She is a political operative engaged in a campaign of corporate espionage and information warfare, in which she has exchanged the role of line producer for a turn in front of the cameras. The purpose of the operation is to weaken or destroy the social network that progressive elites\u2014the peers of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s \u2014see as the central node for conservative communications.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Who is running the Haugen show? The stage manager is\u00a0Bill Burton<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> founder of Bryson Gillette, a Democrat-linked consultancy, and former deputy press secretary in the Obama White House. Burton\u2019s wife, Kelly Ward Burton, is president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a key piece of party machinery chaired by Obama administration shield-bearer and former Attorney General Eric Holder, and whose activities provide former President Barack Obama with an interparty platform and connection to the grassroots (and which maintains an active Facebook page, of course). What could be more democratic than banning the opposing party from America\u2019s favorite monopoly speech platform?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Bill Burton<\/strong> \/ GAGE SKIDMORE\/WIKIPEDIA<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The\u00a0money<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>behind the anti-democratic op comes from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, a French American billionaire of Iranian extraction who attended the same prep school in Hawaii from which Obama graduated. Omidyar also funds The Intercept, a left-wing publication founded in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald. In October 2020, Greenwald\u00a0resigned<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>after the publication\u2019s editors censored his own article criticizing the news blackout that hid reports of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When it comes to censorship, it appears the Obama faction knows its base. According to an August Pew Research\u00a0poll<\/a>, 65% of Democrats believe the government should take steps to restrict \u201cfalse information,\u201d even if it means limiting freedom of information, and 76% believe that tech companies should do it. The latter is up 16 points from 2018, two years after the oligarchy turned its media courtiers\u00a0loose<\/a>\u00a0on Zuckerberg, whom they blamed for Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat (on account of $100,000 worth of ads Facebook sold to Russian troll farms in 2016). U.S. spy services institutionalized their faithfulness to this ludicrous claim when special counsel Robert Mueller published his final Russia report in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But what really angered prestige media organizations was that at the same time Facebook had destroyed their business models and\u00a0made<\/a>\u00a0their products nearly superfluous, it helped boost the popularity of right-wing sites, like Breitbart. A 2017 story from\u00a0The Atlantic, “<\/em>What Facebook Did to American Democracy<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span>\u201d best expressed the left-wing media\u2019s grief and resentment:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Through 2015,\u00a0Breitbart<\/em>\u00a0went from a medium-sized site with a small Facebook page of 100,000 likes into a\u00a0powerful force shaping the election<\/a><\/span>\u00a0with almost 1.5 million likes. In the key metric for Facebook\u2019s News Feed, its posts got 886,000 interactions from Facebook users in January. By July,\u00a0Breitbart<\/em>\u00a0had surpassed\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 main account in interactions. By December, it was doing 10 million interactions per month, about 50 percent of Fox News, which had 11.5 million likes on its main page.\u00a0Breitbart<\/em>\u2019s audience was hyper-engaged.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Thus the real problem wasn\u2019t Facebook, nor indeed was it even Donald Trump, who served as a catalyst for the dangerous phenomenon of right-wing \u201chyper-engagement.\u201d No, the problem was the users themselves, ordinary Americans worried about the direction they felt the country was headed. And so the only logical answer was to shut them up by banning the speech of half the country, which, it was agreed, should properly be labeled\u00a0misinformation<\/em>\u00a0designed to promote\u00a0radicalization<\/em>\u00a0that might well lead to\u00a0domestic terrorism<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zuckerberg was caught in a dilemma\u2014either blow up his financial model, which ostensibly welcomes conservative as well as progressive users, or be torn apart by Big Tech competitors who had the Democrats in their pockets. Perhaps he tried to explain this dilemma to Trump during their\u00a0private meetings<\/a>\u00a0at the White House in 2019. The then-president might have been sympathetic, given that he was being hounded by the same people.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard to miss the similarities between the anti-Facebook operation and those that targeted Trump. The first impeachment also started with a \u201cwhistleblower,\u201d CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who filed a whistleblower\u2019s complaint concerning Trump\u2019s phone call with the president of Ukraine. When the Justice Department ruled that there was no legal or procedural basis for the complaint, Democratic officials pushed it through the media anyway. And it was the media\u2019s false Trump-Russia reports sourced to memos compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele that serves as the model for \u201cThe Facebook Papers,\u201d a self-congratulatory exercise in propaganda masquerading as investigative reporting, sourced to the documents Haugen exfiltrated from her former employer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe Facebook Papers represents a unique collaboration between 17 American news organizations,\u201d according to\u00a0promotional copy<\/a>. \u201cJournalists from a variety of newsrooms, large and small, worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, no one had to gain access to anything to participate in a \u201cmedia event\u201d that amounts to ritual mass bootlicking\u2014Burton\u2019s team merely distributed prepackaged \u201creports\u201d to content providers who understand that their job is to print progressive elite talking points as news.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For example, according to \u201cThe Facebook Papers,\u201d the social media company\u00a0knows<\/em>, from its own internal research, that it has a negative effect on the self-image of teenage girls. Given that a major engine of post-WWII American prosperity is the comprehensive corporate effort to persuade females between the ages of 12 and 62 to buy things, it hardly comes as news that Facebook \u201cknows\u201d that it, too, profits from mass consumer culture. An even more absurd \u201crevelation\u201d to come out of Haugen\u2019s \u201ctruth-telling\u201d is that Facebook is worried the site is losing popularity with young people.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of the nearly 3 billion active Facebook users around the world who could be expected to see through this nonsense, you\u2019d imagine at least some of them would include the graying men and women on the Republican side of the Senate. Don\u2019t any of them have grandchildren? How do they keep up with their grandkids\u2019 birthday parties, music recitals, and Little League games? Right, through Facebook. Facebook is\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0old people, not for kids. Facebook executives have known this for years; it is the central fact of Facebook\u2019s financial model.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And because older people tend to be more conservative, there is more engagement with conservative news on Facebook than on any other social media platform. And that\u2019s why the oligarchy wants to destroy it, regardless of whether Trump runs for president again.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So why did Republican senators play along? Because their constituents are worried about Big Tech censorship, but lawmakers don\u2019t actually know what to do about it. With Haugen, the Democrats teed up a photo op so Republicans could say they were\u00a0actively<\/em>\u00a0combating Big Tech in a bipartisan effort to protect teenagers\u2014by helping Democrats dismantle the communications network of the GOP voter base. In other words, Senate Republicans can\u2019t even defend their own constituents, never mind Facebook.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Late last month, Trump announced a new media company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which will include a platform to challenge Facebook. The former president let on that he felt betrayed when Zuckerberg\u00a0spent<\/a>\u00a0$400 million on local 2020 elections that helped boost Democratic turnout in key districts. But it was the founder of Facebook who got suckered into paying extortion to oligarchs who invariably saw his willingness to pay as a sign of weakness. Now Zuckerberg is caught between tech on one side and Trump on the other.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lee Smith<\/strong> is the author of the newly published book\u00a0The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Facebook Whistleblower Op LEE SMITH Frances Haugen, the Facebook \u2018whistleblower,\u2019 speaks during a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., 2021JABIN BOTSFORD\/THE WASHINGTON POST\/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES The latest effort to censor information damaging to Democrats and the oligarchs they serve masquerades as concern for teenage girls. . Why is everyone waging war on Facebook? If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90453"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90453"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90470,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90453\/revisions\/90470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}