Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

Washington Post logoStarting as early as 2015, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the then-candidate that transformed the world’s information battlefield for years to come.

Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.

To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said. Continue reading.

Facebook to label but leave up ‘newsworthy’ posts that violate policies

The Hill logoFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the platform will label but leave up posts deemed “newsworthy” that violate company policies, a major reversal that comes after weeks of criticism.

“We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “We’ll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society — but we’ll add a prompt to tell people that the content they’re sharing may violate our policies.”

He pointed specifically to posts from politicians, writing that “we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm.” Continue reading.

What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?

New York Times logoMark Zuckerberg has forged an uneasy alliance with the Trump administration. He may have gotten too close.

Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.

That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.

But I was able to pry some of those details loose last week from White House officials along with current and former senior Facebook employees and people they speak to. Most said they would only talk on the condition their names not be used, since the company is not eager to call attention to Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with the president. Continue reading.

Facebook employees said they were ‘caught in an abusive relationship’ with Trump as internal debates raged

Washington Post logoA week of internal debates shows widespread anxiety about how the company will handle abuse going into 2020, according to a trove of internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

SAN FRANCISCO — At an emergency town hall meeting Facebook held this week, days after President Trump posted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” on his account, 5,500 Facebook employees had a demand for Mark Zuckerberg.

Before the meeting, the employees voted in a poll on which questions to ask the chief executive at the meeting, according to internal documents viewed by The Washington Post. The question that got the most votes: “Can we please change our policies around political free speech? Fact checking and removal of hate speech shouldn’t be exempt for politicians.”

Zuckerberg also met privately with black executives to discuss their pain and objections to Trump’s post, which referred to responding to protesters over George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis police custody. And employees questioned whether Facebook was in an “abusive relationship” with the president, according to a trove of documents that included more than 200 posts from an internal message board that showed unrest among employees. Continue reading.

Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump had a secret dinner last month

In October, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made national headlines when he visited Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, Libra. Having faced scandal after scandal during the past few years, this visit to Capitol Hill was contentious, with progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Katie Porter (Calif.) in particular grilling the Facebook boss about his website’s practices. But it turns out that Zuckerberg’s appearance before the House wasn’t the only stop he made while in the nation’s capital: NBC News reported late Wednesday that Zuckerberg had a private dinner with President Trump during his October visit.

Also at the dinner was Peter Thiel, a multi-billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Republican donor — and, oh yeah, Facebook board member. Thiel, like Facebook, has a fraught relationship with the media; Zuckerberg spent part of his October testimony explaining his resistance to fact-checking political advertisements on his platform, even as the spread of false information on Facebook faces increased scrutiny.

While the White House did not comment on the dinner, Facebook did. “As is normal for a CEO of a major U.S. company, Mark accepted an invitation to have dinner with the president and first lady at the White House,” a company spokesman wrote in an email to NBC News.

View the complete November 21 article by Seamus Kirst on the Mic.com website here.

Phillips Questions Zuckerberg As House Considers Election Security Package

WASHNGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about online foreign interference in U.S. Elections during a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee. The hearing comes as the House passed the SHIELD Act (Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for A Lasting Democracy Act), a comprehensive election security package. The SHIELD Act includes Rep. Dean Phillips’s (MN-03) Firewall Act, aimed at preventing foreign interference in U.S. elections by prohibiting foreign nationals from paying for online advertisements created to attack or support federal candidates.

During his questioning, Phillips raised concerns about the ability of foreign entities to purchase political ads on the social media platform. Phillips told Zuckerberg to expect Congressional scrutiny should Facebook allow entities to purchase ads with Facebook’s proposed anonymous crypto-currency, Libra.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in interview he fears ‘erosion of truth’ but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads

Washington Post logoHis approach to political speech has come under fire in recent weeks

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview he worries “about an erosion of truth” online but defended the policy that allows politicians to peddle ads containing misrepresentations and lies on his social network, a stance that has sparked an outcry during the 2020 presidential campaign.

“People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth,” Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University. “At the same time, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with.”

Continue reading “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in interview he fears ‘erosion of truth’ but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads”

Stocks suffer worst week in two years

The following article by Sylvan Lane was posted on the Hill website March 23, 2018:

© Getty Images

U.S. stocks suffered their worst week in more than two years after closing Friday with heavy losses.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.8 percent Friday, a 425-point drop, to close at its lowest level since November. The index fell 5.7 percent this week.

It is down 11.6 percent from its 52-week high, entering a formal correction, which is a 10-percent drop from an index or stock’s 52-week peak.

The Standard and Poor’s 500 index dropped 2 percent Friday, driving its weekly loss to 5.9 percent. The S&P took heavy losses from battered financial stocks, though the index avoided hitting correction level. Continue reading “Stocks suffer worst week in two years”