Facebook Launches TV News Feed; Fox News Prominently Featured

 The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire

by Gaius Publius

The very rich aren't like the rest of us, but they're a whole lot like each other. That puts people like Rupert Murdoch, David Koch (who is ailing, by the way), Donald Trump, Russian gangsters and oligarchs, Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg in a much more shared world than most of us care to think about.

For example, recent reports show how money from Russian oligarchs, $21 billion between 2010 and 2014 alone, and laundered through places like Moldava and Latvia, ends up at places like HSBC and Citibank. It makes sense: banks are in the business of acquiring money, and global criminal-political activity is where great big piles of it are found. Banks go where the customers are.

The money-laundering bank BCCI, now defunct, didn't set that pattern, but they were the most prominent to get caught at it. Not too long ago, Jamie Dimon's bank JP Morgan Chase was also caught with its hand in the money-laundering till, but no one thinks of Dimon and his operation as a money-launderer. The BCCI scandal was back in the 1990s, when banks could be accused of crimes. Starting in 2009, that flaw's been fixed.

I suspect at this point that the whole of Donald Trump's operation, or at least the major part of it, involves money-laundering, and that this will be seen by historians as his actual crime. It's also the reason he could be blackmailed out of office, if his enemies would want to go that route. ("Planning to return to that nice little business you have? Want it to exist when you're done here? I think we can work something out; consider this an exit interview.")

The Koch political machine, of course, is a massive money laundering operation, since its donors are invisible and there's so much money involved. Whose money is being hidden? Who knows? Can any source be excluded? None, not even foreign money from who-knows-where.

(There's an obvious side story here, but no one with real power wants to tell it. The global big-money network is also a bad-money network that encompasses almost every one in it. Not just Trump; everyone who floats on money floats on dirty money to some degree or another. Why aren't they all prosecuted? Maybe they're all in the game, including owners of the media that might do the reporting.)

Mark Zuckerberg's News Shows

This brings us to Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch.

You wouldn't think these fellow billionaires would have much else in common. After all, Murdoch is in charge of the massive right-wing propaganda machine known as Fox News, Trump's favorite network and a fortress of evil and destruction to many observers, while Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley billionaire, one of the brightest lights in a culture with a largely left following.

Like Steve Jobs, high tech billionaires supposedly see the better future first and will lead us there. As the poster at the top makes clear, they're seen by many as the better angels of our aspirations.

Thomas Middleditch, actor and star of the hit series Silicon Valley, taking "sellout money" (his phrase) and shilling for Verizon, the company most strongly associated with killing net neutrality

The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire is remarkably similar to the "cult of the airman" from the early 1900s, airmen and women being the supposed far-seeing, kindly futurists of a previous era. For more on that earlier cult, see the introduction to this piece: "Google Scores a Pro-Monopoly Seat on Trump Transition Team."

If you thought, though, that Murdoch and Zuckerberg had little in common but their money, you'd be wrong. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are launching a TV news feed called Facebook Watch.

Facebook’s First Wave of Funded News Shows Will Debut July 16, With More on the Way

The first fruits of Facebook’s multimillion-dollar investment in news programming from brand-name TV networks and digital media companies will go live next week — and the social giant has announced another half-dozen news shows that it’s funding.

Starting on Monday, July 16, programming from CNN, Fox News Channel, Univision, ABC News and others will be featured in a dedicated news section in Facebook Watch, its recently launched video platform for episodic programming. The Watch news section will feature news videos from national and local news orgs, and users will see a personalized feed based on the publishers they follow and what their friends are watching. (Facebook users also can access the shows directly from their show pages.)

The first lineup of previously announced shows from news publishers include those from ABC News, Advance Local, ATTN:, CNN, Fox News, Mic, Quartz, and Univision. Over the course of the next few months, Facebook will bring out additional news shows from ABC-owned stations, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, McClatchy, Group Nine Media’s NowThis and Tegna.

And guess whose programming is prominently featured? The above report, from Variety, might lead you to believe the mix of shows would be fair and balanced. That's true, but only in the most ironic sense. Here's their schedule:

Facebook Watch's initial programming schedule (click to enlarge)

The very rich aren't like the rest of us. But they're a whole lot like each other.

GP
 

America Needs Congressmembers Like Ro Khanna And Kaniela Ing To Watch What Facebook Is Up To

If you watched the Senate Commerce Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee "grilling" Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago... well it wasn't as bad as when Alaska SenatorTed Stevens explaining net neutrality and the internet in terms of a series of tubes and big trucks just over a decade ago. But almost. They're old. And they have staffers who type for them.



Ro Khanna, the progressive congressman who represents Silicon Valley was dismayed-- "less" wrote Alex Nazaryan for Newsweek "because of what the Facebook co-founder and chairman did say-- for the most part, bromides about privacy, security and censorship-- than because of what the lawmakers arrayed before him didn’t." Ro is a calm and composed fella. One can only imagine if Hawaii state Rep-- and congressional candidate-- Kaniela Ing was sitting next to him.

“This was a missed opportunity,” Khanna lamented later that evening in a text message. “The hearing revealed a knowledge gap in Congress about technology.” Many of the men and women questioning Zuckerberg were about twice his age, and some were quite a bit older than that. They knew that adversaries like Russia had weaponized social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, but the particulars of the problem clearly eluded them. The 44 legislators who took turns quizzing Zuckerberg showed only a cursory understanding of data collection and encryption, and the lengthy hearing quickly devolved into the kind of exasperating technology tutorial one dreads having to give aging relatives.

It was an amusing day for the purveyors of humorous internet memes. But anyone anxious about the obviously uneasy marriage between democracy and digital technology would not have been reassured. Zuckerberg left Capitol Hill without having to explain in any appreciable detail the failure that brought him there in the first place: the improper use of data belonging to 87 million Facebook users by data research firm Cambridge Analytica, which was conducting microtargeting work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He did offer apologies and reassurances, but these were vague enough to not be especially reassuring.

Only eight years older than Zuckerberg, Khanna has been called “Silicon Valley's ambassador to Middle America.” California’s 17th congressional district, which he has represented since 2017, is home to some of the most successful corporations in the world: Apple (market value: $892 billion, as of April 16), Intel ($245 billion), Yahoo (now part of Verizon, whose market capitalization stands at $197 billion) and Tesla ($50 billion). Alphabet ($726 billion), with its Googleplex, is one district over, as is Facebook ($480 billion), with its thumbs-up icon announcing its Menlo Park Headquarters, at 1 Hacker Way.

That address captures the mood of Silicon Valley a decade ago: whimsical, cheeky, maybe even hubristic. This was before anyone had ever heard of the Internet Research Agency, where Vladimir Putin’s minions were waging a new kind of war. Psychographic data, of the kind Cambridge Analytica supposedly collected, was not yet for sale to politicians looking for an edge. Trolls were the stuff of medieval legend. And coding savants could not have expected to be lectured by the likes of Senators Chuck Grassley and Dean Heller, as Zuckerberg was earlier this month. The thumb is still there, at 1 Hacker Way, but the joke is no longer funny.

“I believe representing Silicon Valley is one of the most important jobs in American politics,” Khanna says. To represent Silicon Valley is to speak and account for a techno elite given far more to self-celebration than introspection. Aware of the region’s surpassingly good fortunes, and of its closely related tendency to hubris, Khanna has tried to export the former while arguing that it is necessary to tame the latter. He believes that the success of the tech sector is replicable and could serve as economic balm for other parts of the nation, particularly those where mining or manufacturing can no longer vault blue-collar workers into the middle class. Despite troubling disclosures about Facebook and its peers, he believes that most any community would welcome Zuckerberg, along with his Cambridge Analytica problem.

The same week that Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi selected Khanna to draft an Internet Bill of Rights. It was a significant show of confidence in the House freshman by Pelosi, a veteran of the chamber renowned for her political acumen. Although it is impossible to say what an Internet Bill of Rights will look like, Khanna has long proposed such a measure to give Internet users clarity over the data they share as they click through Facebook photos or shop on Amazon.

The Internet Bill of Rights would, in turn, prove a major test of just how much regulation Silicon Valley is willing to countenance. Big Tech has been a remarkably cagey industry, in part because it knows it gives us what nobody else can. It knows that even as we complain about hegemony, we order diapers on Amazon, instead of walking to the corner store. World leaders spar on Twitter, while chefs who once wanted to impress critics now think about what will look good on Instagram. At the same time, Reddit trolls disseminate fake news, which Google algorithms uncritically promote, while terrorists talk freely on WhatsApp, protected by the messaging service’s encryption. Silicon Valley is becoming a victim of its own explosive growth, like the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks that failed in 2008, plunging the nation into a recession.

Khanna is aware of souring public opinion and has tried to both acknowledge it and reshape it. “You can’t be an island of success,” he says of the district he represents. “We have to answer the nation’s call.” If Silicon Valley can answer that call with “humility,” Khanna says, the tech behemoths can avoid the kind of onerous regulation other liberal legislators are calling for, such as the General Data Protection Regulation that will go into effect in Europe in 2018.

Khanna’s indefatigable optimism has positioned him as a potential leader in a Democratic Party unable to reconcile its progressive and centrist elements and desperate for new faces. As a member of the Progressive Caucus, Khanna has advocated for liberal policies such as expansion of the earned-income tax credit. But his corporate past—- and corporate constituency—- keep him from veering too far into the sort of political fantasy for which Northern California is sometimes known. He may be just what the party needs, a moderate by temperament but by no means a centrist.

“You can have a bold progressive vision coming from Silicon Valley, rooted in patriotism,” Khanna says. “And I guess the case study is they elected me.”

..."This is a huge opportunity for tech leaders to work with Congress,” Khanna says. Otherwise, he warns, the regulatory power will fall to “a bunch of bureaucrats who, frankly, don't know much about tech,” intellectual siblings of the senators who haplessly interrogated Zuckerberg. If regulation is inevitable, better that regulation be informed by the industry in question.

Back to Kaniela for a moment. He's already taken on Zuckerberg... and won. Kate Arnoff, writing for In These Times explained how in 2014, "Zuckerberg purchased 700 acres of beachfront property on land Native Hawaiians have gathering rights to. Then he built a wall around it, and sued local families to keep them out. Ing helped lead the charge from the state legislature for Native Hawaiians to reclaim their rights to that land, and Zuckerberg eventually dropped the lawsuits. Now, Ing, a Native Hawaiian, is running to represent Hawaii’s first congressional district, with a critique of Facebook and other corporations that extends well beyond their CEOs’ real estate investments. In Washington, Ing hopes to curtail corporate power, and regulate Facebook and other major tech firms like utilities." Kaniela:

We know what it’s like to be up against oligarchy in Hawaii. We’ve lived in a feudal society and a really unequal capitalist society throughout history. Now we’re seeing that repeat. We have three men in American who hold more wealth than the bottom half-- than 50 percent of the entire nation. And 82 percent of new wealth generated in 2017 went to the top 1 percent. It’s more stark than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of today’s oligarchs, just like on the mainland with Standard Oil and some of the other oligarchs in the past. Except now these guys have control over commerce, like Amazon, and communications, like Facebook. And that’s where it gets really dangerous for a democracy. It’s important that Congress act now and not rely on self-regulation by these monopolists.

...Zuckerberg calls Facebook a social utility. And if he’s admitting it’s a utility he should agree that it should be treated like one. The same goes for the internet in general, not just social networks but broadband connection. It’s a necessity now in the modern world, the way electricity was almost a century ago. There was way too much control by a few corporations that actually didn’t benefit the majority of the public. So the government took over lines and-- at the very least-- heavily regulated these monopolies to make sure that everybody had equal access to electricity. We’re going to have to do that for broadband generally, and we’re going to have to do that for social networks. Right now there’s nothing stopping someone like Zuckerberg from adjusting their algorithms to punish people with certain political views or certain companies. Arguably it’s already happening. A lot of independent news sources don’t have the same ability to reach their own followers that more corporate news sources do. That’s unfair.

If you'd like to help Kaniela win his race-- against 3 conservative barely Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- please click on the thermometer above and contribute what you can to his campaign. You want to see real change in Congress? There's no one who's out to do that, and ready to do that, like Kaniela.

How to Turn Off Third-Party Data Access to Your Facebook Account

Is Facebook evil by design? (source)

by Gaius Publius

Note: To jump straight to the steps, click here.

Facebook has come under scrutiny lately for its role in passively giving data on 50 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, a company that uses Facebook-type data to target and change electoral outcomes worldwide. (There's more on the Cambridge Analytica story here and here. Note that Carole Cadwalladr is a co-author of both stories. Her reporting is one of the centers for information about this revelation.)

Cambridge Analytica got that Facebook data, not because Facebook gave it to them, but because Facebook's policy on info-sharing allowed them to harvest it. Here's how that was done (h/t Naked Capitalism; emphasis mine):

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Forget the Trump factor and consider simply the Cambridge Analytica app and how it operated.

People who agreed and were paid to use it gave up more information to the app than was disclosed to them. Part of what they unknowingly surrendered was information from the profiles of all of their Facebook friends. That's how harvesting the data from 270,000 people became a hack, via the app, of data on 50 million, who gave no approval for this transfer.

Note also that the means by which the original data was acquired was a ruse. The company's interest in its "personality test" — thisisyourdigitallife — was false. All they wanted was the data it extracted.

"Exactly How Facebook's Infrastructure Was Designed to Work"

This is not an aberration; this is how Facebook is designed to work and the source of the great wealth of its founders and investors. These Facebook apps (the games you play, the "tests" you take, and so on) are designed specifically as data transfers, to Facebook itself and to its customers.

When you play a game on Facebook or take part in a "quiz" to see which Roman emperor you most resemble (or whatever), you may think you're taking part in the "fun" of being on Facebook. In reality, you're being used by the app makers, and Facebook is making money selling you and your data to them.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) puts it this way (again, my emphasis):

Over the weekend, it became clear that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company, got access to more than 50 million Facebook users' data in 2014. The data was overwhelmingly collected, shared, and stored without user consent. The scale of this violation of user privacy reflects how Facebook's terms of service and API [Application Programming Interface] were structured at the time. Make no mistake: this was not a data breach. This was exactly how Facebook's infrastructure was designed to work.

The only way to fix this situation for yourself is to turn off the ability of Facebook's "platform API" to send out your data. That means to anyone. You also have to disable your ability to log into third-party sites using your Facebook account. That so-called "convenience" opens big holes.

Getting Between Zuckerberg and His Money

Below are the latest instructions for doing just that. But before we go there, pause to consider what Facebook is — a company that collects masses of data from billions of users, uses algorithms to analyze that data to get more information about its users, then (a) sells that data to third parties for any use they wish, generally manipulative ones; (b) sells access to its users and their data to third parties via games, apps and other means; and (c) uses that data for its own manipulative purposes if it so wishes.

This is where the money is, this is what Facebook was designed to do, and stopping or regulating it means using the government to get between Facebook's investors and a honking huge pile of money. In these neoliberal times, that's going to be a monster ask.

How To Turn Off Third-Party App Access to Your Data

Now the fix for your own account. You could, of course, just delete your Facebook account, but until Facebook is regulated, they're going to keep the data you've already given them anyway. #DeleteFacebook is a good personal solution to the problem going forward, but it's understandably not for everyone.

For those who choose not to do delete their Facebook account, here's how, as of this writing, to eliminate access to your Facebook data by third-party apps. This comes from the EFF article linked above, but has been modified to reflect changes Facebook has already made since the controversy (what a mild term) erupted.

As the EFF piece warns, "Keep in mind that this disables ALL platform apps (like Farmville, Twitter, or Instagram) and you will not be able to log into sites using your Facebook login."

Step 1. Click the pull-down arrow in the upper right corner of your Facebook page and select Settings. Then click Apps in the column on the left. (Or click here for a shortcut that takes you to the same place.)

Step 2. Remove your Facebook login from all apps currently using it by looking in the large blue box labeled "Logged in with Facebook," clicking on the check box below each app name, then clicking Remove.

Explanation: The first large box below "App Settings" is labeled "Logged in with Facebook". Listed are games, organizations and apps where your Facebook login is already your app login.

My suggestion, don't ever use your Facebook login as a third-party login. Instead create a login that's specific to that organization or app and tie nothing to your Facebook account.

When a game or other web-based app asks you to create an account or "sign in with Facebook or Twitter," you're handing over access to your account data if you choose the easier Facebook (or Twitter) option — just as those who took money from Cambridge Analytica did. Yes, you can limit this access to just certain types of data, but (a) most people don't do that, and (b) who knows if app or the organization behind it is doing just what Cambridge Analytica did?

Step 3. Now remove this permission generally. Under "Apps, Websites and Games" see if the setting is "turned on" or "turned off." If it's turned off, you're done.

If it's turned on, click the Edit button, then click Turn Off. You're done.

Explanation: As Facebook reminds you, if you turn off this setting:

• You won't be able to log into apps or websites using Facebook
• Apps and websites you've logged into with Facebook may delete your accounts and activity
• You won't be able to play some games on Facebook [Gameroom], and [some of] your gaming activity may be deleted
• Your posts, photos and videos on Facebook that apps and websites have published may be deleted
• You won't be able to interact with or share content from other apps and websites on Facebook using social plugins such as the Share and Like buttons

You may miss the use of Share and Like buttons on websites, but that's the price. As of this writing, they don't separate the permissions associated with Share and Like buttons from Facebook's Gameroom and third-party login permissions. You can always go to Facebook itself and Share or Like a web post.

Final Words

Just as the "business model of Wall Street is fraud" (Bernie Sanders), the business model of Facebook is "surveillance." As I said above, the reason third parties offer Facebook games, apps and login options is to harvest, monetize and use the data of people with Facebook accounts.

And the reason Facebook exists at all is to monetize the motherlode of data on its billions of users — or use that data in any other way they wish. Could Facebook itself swing elections? I think they think they can. Have they already tried? Who knows.

Facebook and its ilk are a problem, and as near as I can tell an entirely modern one. This situation does need a solution, but it may never get one until the modern neoliberal regime is overturned.

GP