Joey
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Some Guy wrote on Apr 10 th, 2018 at 3:46pm: Chins, Russia and Iran aligning with Syria. US battleships off the coast. Trump saying his decision coming soon. Shit is getting real. < ----------- Some Guy ?! .... !!!!! : " The Zuckerberg Collusion " " Was it Facebook’s job to tell voters Russian bots were working for Trump’s election? " " Somehow in our time all the problems of human existence have boiled down to one cause: Russian collusion.
What is the main reason Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of three committees of Congress? It is because the media connected a long series of dots to suggest the possibility that Russian bots exploited the personal Facebook data obtained by a firm named Cambridge Analytica to . . . put Donald Trump in the White House. Without the link to collusion—an infinitely elastic phrase with no legal meaning—Mr. Zuckerberg never would have had to leave Menlo Park.
The live Zuckerberg testimony was torture, forcing anyone interested to hear innumerable senators and House members share their thoughts on technology. Lowering the bar on Senate discourse below swamp level, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy said the Facebook user agreement “sucks.”
Despite the legislators’ thunderings about regulation, the likelihood of the House and Senate enacting rules for the web is more remote than Halley’s Comet, due back in 43 years. Congress has failed for years to bring royalty payments for creators of music into the digital age.
It’s sport now to mock Mark Zuckerberg, but taking an idea from your dorm room to a market cap of more than $400 billion proves he’s no dope. What Mark Zuckerberg thinks about what he did deserves attention.
Mr. Zuckerberg divided his prepared testimony between two subjects. The first, headlined “Cambridge Analytica,” was a proxy for the personal-privacy issue; the other was “Russian Election Interference,” a proxy for the collusion obsession.
The Facebook founder describes “Russian interference” as if it is so ubiquitous in his world that it has become an everyday term, like server farms. But Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony offered insight into how the dailiness of Russian interference morphed into the firestorm of “Russian collusion.”
He said Facebook was aware of “traditional” Russian cyberthreats “for years,” including a group called APT28, which he noted our intelligence services had linked to the Russians.
This time frame revives a relevant question: Why didn’t the Obama administration alert the American people in 2015 or earlier to the threat of Russian political subversion? Protecting us from Russian bots wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s responsibility.
We’ll push that further. The “Russian collusion” narrative began in January 2017, coincident with the release of a report by Mr. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, whose headline finding was, “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Buried beneath the subsequent stampede toward “collusion” was the report’s extensive description of U.S. intelligence’s longstanding, pre-Trump concerns about a Russian “network of quasi-government trolls.” This network was suspected of running cyber-based propaganda campaigns against a range of targets—European governments, the Olympics, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and “since early 2014,” multiple state and local electoral boards. But somehow all this suspected Russian interference wasn’t worth putting in front of American voters until after they elected Donald Trump.
Some 15 months later, the Russian-collusion grand opera has degraded into an FBI smash-and-grab operation against Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to find payoffs to porn stars. It’s little wonder nearly half the Senate showed up to discuss privacy for a day with the $70 billion man.
Privacy on the web matters, but the odds are overwhelming that before Congress gets to it, another technology—probably blockchain—will mitigate the problem. Of more pressing concern are Mr. Zuckerberg’s thoughts on what he keeps calling the values of the Facebook “community.” Meaning what?
A primary criticism of social-media platforms like Facebook is that they expose users to content that encourages “hate” or is “hurtful.”
Facebook’s answer to this perceived problem has been to hire some 15,000 people dedicated to “community operations and review,” with more monitors on the way.
During his pre-Congress apology tour, Mr. Zuckerberg elaborated on this subject to Vox:
“Over the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion.
“You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”
Up to now, there has been no such thing in the United States as “acceptable speech” defined by the norms and values of people all around the world. Because of his status, Mr. Zuckerberg is a thought leader, and so this idea is not far-fetched.
The bedrock idea of free speech is under pressure in the U.S. now. But if I had to guess which will arrive first—federal regulation of individual privacy or a speech panel of “independent folks” defining what is acceptable—on current course, I think I know which one it will be. "
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